Application domains that contain planning and scheduling (P&S) problems pose a combination of issues, from modelling to technological to institutional, that present challenges to the AI planning and scheduling community. New domains and real-world problems are becoming more frequent challenges for AI. The international Scheduling and Planning Applications woRKshop (SPARK) series was established to help address the gap between developments in the AI P&S community and application of these advances.

The aim of the workshop series is to provide a stable, long-term forum collocated with ICAPS, where researchers and practitioners can discuss the applications of planning and scheduling techniques to real problems rather than academic benchmarks. That is, domains and problem instances should be under study for, or closely inspired by, a real industrial/commercial deployment of P&S techniques. This workshop marks the fourth in the SPARK series: the web sites of the previous editions are available at http://decsai.ugr.es/~lcv/SPARK/.

The challenges and discussions that emerged from last year's edition set the baseline for this year's SPARK workshop. A goal of the workshop series is the definition of a longer term set of challenges that could be of benefit for the research community as well as practitioners. Authors of accepted papers will be encouraged to share their domains and instances, or parts of them, towards a library of practical benchmarking problems that could also be useful for the community.

The best papers from prior editions of the workshop were invited to a journal special issue. The highest quality papers from SPARK'10 will be eligible for a journal special issue or post-proceedings volume.