[eclipse-clp-users] CPAIOR'10 - Workshop on Open Source Tools for CP and MP

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Call for Papers, Abstracts, and Discussion Topics
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Workshop on Open Source Tools for
Constraint Programming and Mathematical Programming

June 15, 2010, Bologna, Italy

http://coral.ie.lehigh.edu/~cpaior

To be held in conjunction with CPAIOR-10, the 7th International Conference on
Integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Operations Research (OR)
techniques in Constraint Programming

http://cpaior2010.ing.unibo.it

This workshop aims to support increased cooperation between the mathematical
programming and constraint programming communities and between various groups
within each of those communities in developing solvers for difficult
optimization problems. The workshop will address the interfacing and
integration of the wide variety of open source tools for optimization that are
currently under development in a number of different independent efforts. Such
tools range from modeling languages and standards for instance representation
to implementations of low-level components of solvers. The question to be
addressed in the workshop is to what degree tools from various different
projects can interoperate. We would like to explore whether it is possible to
define standard interfaces between modeling environments and solvers, as well
as between the various components of solvers that allow the techniques being
developed and implemented in open source to be easily combined in novel ways
that extend the capabilities of individual solvers.

The workshop is aimed primarily at the designers and developers of algorithms,
libraries and platforms for modeling and solving optimization problems, but
may also be of interest to sophisticated users of optimization software. The
mathematical programming and constraint programming communities are the target
communities we have in mind, but we anticipate interest also from other
communities, such as SAT and AI. The workshop is intended to open discussions
about the requirements for interfacing various tools. The eventual goal is to
agree a set of interface levels and some initial design of languages and/or
API standards bridging various mathematical programming and constraint
programming systems.

Though the integration of MP and CP techniques has been a topic of discussion
in both communities for some time and there have been a number of projects
undertaking the task of integration within a single framework, no efforts to
allow established codes from different projects to interoperate has been
undertaken. The most important aspect of interoperation is standardization. In
the CP community, a standardization effort was announced at CP 2009 (see
http://www.cpstandards.org/). The COIN-OR Project (http://www.coin-or.org) has
undertaken similar efforts within the MP community. At the workshop, we hope
to bring these two communities together.

The workshop will consist of a mix of short and long talks, invited speakers,
as well as discussion sessions. We solicit three kinds of submissions for this
workshop:

1. Papers reporting new results, as well as preliminary or recently published
   work related to the above described topics. There is no specific formatting
   requirement or page limit. Papers reporting results that have already been
   published or presented at another venue should clearly indicate so.

2. Abstracts (up to 2 pages) reporting preliminary results, describing an open
   problem, proposing ideas for bringing new computational methods into the
   field, or summarizing the focus areas of a group working in this area.

3. Proposals for leading a discussion topic on a specific area, open problems,
   or any other topic of interest. Such proposals should consist of a one page
   description of the proposed topic and how the proposers envision the
   session. An example format would be a short presentation by the discussion
   lead followed by an open discussion focused on a few specific questions.

Please note that there will not be any published proceedings for the workshop.

** IMPORTANT DATES **

Submission Deadline: April 1, 2010 (Thursday), 11:59 Pacific Time
Notification: April 10, 2010 (Saturday)
Workshop: June 15, 2010 (Tuesday)


** SUBMISSION and REGISTRATION**

Papers, abstracts, and discussion proposals should be submitted as a PDF file
by sending an email to ted_at_...233...

At least one author of each accepted submission must attend the workshop. The
workshop will be open to everyone to attend, regardless of whether they have
an accepted submission. However, all workshop attendies must pay either the
CPAIOR registration fee including the workshop fee or the fee at attend only
the workshop. For detailed registration information, please refer to the
CPAIOR web page: http://cpaior2010.ing.unibo.it.


** WORKSHOP ORGANIZERS **

Ted Ralphs, Lehigh University, USA
Mark Wallace, Monash University, Australia

** PROGRAM COMMITTEE **

 * Pietro Belotti, Lehigh University, USA
 * Jacob Feldman, Cork Constraint Computation Centre, Ireland
 * Bill Hart, Sandia National Labs, USA
 * Narendra Jussien, EMN Nantes, France
 * Thorsten Koch, ZIB, Germany
 * Andrea Lodi, DEIS, University of Bologna, Italy
 * Kipp Martin, University of Chicago, USA
 * Jean Francois Puget, IBM, France
 * Joachim Schimpf, Monash University, Australia
 * Christian Schulte, KTH - Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
 * Peter Stuckey, University of Melbourne, Australia