This new conference follows the series of CP-AI-OR International Workshops on Integration of AI and OR Techniques in Constraint Programming for Combinatorial Optimisation Problems held in Ferrara (1999), Paderborn (2000), Ashford (2001), Le Croisic (2002), and Montreal (2003).
The success of the previous workshops has demonstrated that CP-AI-OR is becoming a major forum for exchanging ideas and methodologies from both fields. The aim of this new conference is to bring together interested researchers from AI and OR, and to give them the opportunity to show how the integration of techniques from AI and OR can lead to interesting results on large scale and complex problems. We explicitly welcome new ideas and methods for integrating OR and AI techniques that have arisen from real-world applications.
The integration of techniques from Artificial Intelligence and Operations Research has provided effective algorithms for tackling complex and large scale combinatorial problems with significant improvements in terms of efficiency, scalability and optimality. The benefit of this integration has been shown in applications such as hoist scheduling, rostering, dynamic scheduling and vehicle routing. At the programming/modelling level, most constraint languages embed OR techniques to reason about collections of constraints, so-called global constraints. Some languages also provide support for hybridization allowing the programmer to build new integrated algorithms. The resulting multi-paradigm programming framework combines the flexibility and modelling facilities of Constraint Programming with the special purpose and efficient methods from Operations Research.
CP-AI-OR is intended primarily as a forum to focus on the integration of the approaches of CP, AI, and OR technologies. A secondary aim is to provide an opportunity for researchers in one area to learn about techniques in others. Therefore, papers that actively combine, integrate or contrast approaches from more than one of the areas and papers describing scientific advances in a single area are solicited.
The programm committee invites submissions that include but are not limited to the following topics:
The 2004 conference is organized by INRIA (french national institute for research in computer science and control). It will take place in Nice, France on April 20-22.
The length of a standard technical paper is 15 pages. However, CPAIOR is interested in promoting a wide variety of opportunities for fruitful exchanges among the CP, OR and AI communities. Researchers are thus invited to submit late-breaking results in the form of short papers (up to 6 pages). Short papers should present interesting recent results or novel thought-provoking ideas that are not quite ready for a regular full-length paper. A presentation will be scheduled in the conference program for the accepted short papers. They will also be published in the Conference Proceedings.
All Papers are to be submitted electronically by following the instructions at the URL http://www-sop.inria.fr/coprin/cpaior04/submit.html
The publication of the proceedings in the Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science series ( http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/index.html) is planned.
Authors are requested to prepare their papers by following the Springer instructions ( http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html).
Before the conference, a master class for PhD students, researchers and practitioners will be organized by Andrea Lodi and Michela Milano (University of Bologna). The topic of the master class will be "Graph Theory and Constraint Programming". Speakers will be announced soon.
The conference will take place in the heart of Nice, at the Westminster Hotel located on the Promenades des Anglais facing the sea.