16th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming

This discussion will be held on Friday Sep 10 from 9:00am to 10:20am. It will be a continuation of the standardization discussion that started at CP 2009 in Lisbon. The aim of the standardization effort is to make CP technology more accessible for business application developers. It focuses on the creation of unified business interface(s) for modeling and solving real-world decision support problems. Having common interfaces will allow commercial application developers to model their problems in such a way that the same model can be tried with different CP Solvers. This will minimize vendor dependence without limiting vendor's innovation. At the same time the standardization can help to bring the latest research results to real-world business applications.

This year the standardization discussion will be around the following topics

• Current state of CP standardization efforts
• Standardizing CP API for main-stream programming languages
• Java CP API JSR-331: Early Draft Review
• CP Modeling Languages
• Creating CP DSL with new dynamic languages (Python, Groovy, Scala, and others)
• CP XML
• Integration with MIP/LP tools

We invite all CP vendors and industrial users of constraint programming to nominate representatives for the Discussion Panel and to make brief presentations about their positions regarding CP Standardization. Please send names of representatives to Jacob Feldman at j.feldman@4c.ucc.ie before August 30, 2010. All CP practitioners and conference attendees are welcome to participate in this important discussion!

Constraint Programming (CP) is a powerful technology to model and solve combinatorial problems, which are ubiquitous in academia and industry. The last ten years or so have witnessed significant research devoted to modelling and solving problems with constraints. CP is now a mature field and has been successfully used for tackling a wide range of real-life complex applications. However, such a technology is currently accessible to only a small number of experts. For CP to be more widely used by non-experts, more research effort is needed in order to ease the use of the CP technology. We solicit original papers that contribute to widen the use of the CP technology. Topics will include: application papers, contributions to modelling, the design of high-level modelling languages, and automatic reformulation techniques.

A symmetry is a transformation that preserves solutions that are considered equivalent. For instance, rotating a chess board 180 degrees gives a board that is indistinguishable from the original board. Symmetry increases the apparent complexity of combinatorial problems. In the presence of symmetry, a constraint solver may waste a large amount of time considering symmetric but equivalent assignments or partial assignments. Hence, dealing with symmetry is often crucial to the success of solving such combinatorial problems efficiently.

This is the 10th workshop of the very successful SymCon series, founded in 2001.

LSCS is an annual workshop, since 2004, devoted to local search techniques in constraint satisfaction. This workshop focuses on all aspects of local search techniques, including: design and implementation of new algorithms, hybrid stochastic-systematic search, reactive search optimization, adaptive search, modeling for local-search, global constraints, flexibility and robustness, learning methods, and specific applications. The workshop will provide an informal environment for discussions about recent results in these and related areas. Papers are solicited from the above areas or from any other area related to local search in constraint satisfaction. In addition to contributed papers, we will have one invited lecture.

The Quantification in Constraint Programming Workshop is is open to all aspects related to quantification in Constraint Programming and SAT. The aim of the workshop is to present ongoing work and to exchange ideas on modeling and solving quantified problems. Topics include, but are not limited to: algorithms for QBF/QCSP, modeling issues, global constraints, complexity results, uncertainty handling, stochastic variables, implementation issues, applications.

Preferences are ubiquitous in real life: most problems are over-constrained and would not be solvable if all their requirements are strictly met. Moreover, many problems are more naturally described via preference rather than hard statements. Soft constraints are the way the constraint community has extended its classical framework to deal with the concept of preferences. The SofT'10 workshop will bring together researchers interested in all aspects of soft constraints and cost function processing, including theoretical frameworks, problem modeling, algorithms, languages, preference aggregation and elicitation, multi-objective or qualitative optimization, combining and integrating different frameworks and algorithms, comparative studies, real-life applications, evaluation, benchmarks and repositories. The SofT'10 workshop is an opportunity for knowledg e sharing among researchers working in algorithms and solvers for different formalisms, including Weighted Max-SAT, Soft CSP, Bayesian Networks, Random Markov Field, Factor Graphs, Pseudo Boolean Optimization, SAT Modulo Theories.

The workshop focuses on implementation issues of constraint programming systems. Submissions and participation are encouraged from all members of the CP community and all people interested in the implementation of constraint programming systems. Possible topics include, but are not limited to, software design aspects of CP systems, data structures and algorithms for constraint solving, parallelization approaches, design and implementation of programming/modeling/solving environments, surveys of often-used but undocumented folklore techniques, or hybrid solvers. The workshop will provide a place at CP where useful results, practical tricks and preliminary work can be presented. Contributions to the workshop can include paper presentations, poster presentations, system demonstrations, and five-minute lightning talks.

Graphical structures have been successfully utilized to solve a number of computationally challenging problems many of which can be expressed as constraint models. In particular, problems related to decision support such as probabilistic inference or configuration have been addressed through compiling these models into computationally efficient graphical representations (NNFs, tree-automata, AND/OR graphs, and decision diagrams). Furthermore, these graphical structures are increasingly used in a classical constraint programming context: to improve the search for feasible/optimal solutions, to enhance propagation of global constraints or to enhance communication between constraints.

The focus of this workshop will be on the use of graphical approaches in enabling structural properties of constraint models to be exploited for a number of tasks, such as constraint propagation, solution counting, reasoning with soft constraints and preferences, inference under uncertainty, and configuration. In addition, the workshop welcomes contributions that exploit constraint-reasoning techniques to enhance construction and manipulation of graphical structures.

Computational Sustainability is a newly emerging interdisciplinary field that aims to apply techniques from computer science, information science, operations research, applied mathematics, and statistics for balancing environmental, economic, and societal needs for sustainable development. The main focus is on computational and mathematical models and methods for decision making concerning the management and allocation of resources. Creating and optimizing these models often presents a scalability challenge. Bringing in advanced computational methods to tackle these large scale problems holds tremendous promise for the application areas and for computer science.

This workshop will bring together interested researchers in order to facilitate the exchange of ideas, presentation of recent or preliminary results, and discussion of promising directions in this area. While the main focus of this workshop will be on computational methods related to constraint programming (CP) and constraint optimization, we also encourage submissions in other computational areas and techniques relevant to sustainability problems.