C A L L  F O R  P A P E R S

                   The Third International Conference on
           Integration of AI and OR Techniques in Constraint Programming
                    for Combinatorial Optimization Problems
                                CP-AI-OR'06
                     May 31-June 2, 2006, Cork, Ireland
    http://tidel.mie.utoronto.ca/cpaior            [log in to unmask]

After a successful series of five international workshops (Ferrara,
Paderborn, Ashford, Le Croisic, and Montreal) and two international
conferences (Nice, Prague), the third international conference devoted to
integration of Constraint Programming, Artificial Intelligence, and
Operations Research techniques will be held in Cork, Ireland, in 2006.

The aim of the 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. CP-AI-OR is intended primarily as a forum to focus on the
integration and hybridization 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 are solicited. High quality papers from a single area are eligible
provided that they are of interest to other communities involved.

CP-AI-OR'06 will be preceded by a Master Class where leading researchers
give introductory and overview talks. This year, the topic of the Master
Class will be "Modelling and Solving for Uncertainty and Change." The Master
Class is intended for PhD students, researchers, and practitioners.

The program committee invites submissions that include but are not limited
to the following topics:
- Integration of constraint relaxation methods, e.g. constraint propagation,
  cutting planes, reduced costs, global constraints, graph algorithms,
  dynamic programming, Lagrangean and convex relaxations, heuristic
  functions based on constraint relaxation.
- Integration of search and solving methods, e.g. branch and bound,
  intelligent backtracking, incomplete search, randomized search, column
  generation and other decomposition methods, local search, meta-heuristics.
- Forms of integration, e.g. static/dynamic problem decomposition, linking
  variables and constraints in different solvers, transformations between
  models and solvers, methods using information derived by other solving
  methods, collaboration between concurrent methods, models, and solvers.
- Problems, modeling, and applications.

Papers should be at most 15 pages in length, and should be prepared in the
format used for the Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science series
(http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html). It is planned that the
proceedings will be published in the Springer Lecture Notes in Computer
Science series (http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/index.html). All papers are
to be submitted electronically in a PDF or PS format by following the
instructions at the URL http://tidel.mie.utoronto.ca/cpaior/.

Following the conference, authors of all accepted papers will be invited to
submit substantially extended versions of their papers to a special issue of
the Annals of Operations Research devoted to papers from CP-AI-OR'06. These
papers will undergo an additional, very thorough refereeing process and a
selection of the best papers will be published.


IMPORTANT DATES FOR AUTHORS

Deadline for paper submissions January 9, 2006
Notification of acceptance     February 24, 2006
Camera-ready copy              March 7, 2006

Master Class                   May 30, 2006
CP-AI-OR'06                    May 31-June 2, 2006


ORGANIZATION

Program Chairs
Chris Beck, University of Toronto, Canada
Barbara Smith, Cork Constraint Computation Centre, Ireland

Conference Chair
Barry O'Sullivan, Cork Constraint Computation Centre, Ireland

Master Class Chairs
Ken Brown, Cork Constraint Computation Centre, Ireland
Armagan Tarim, Cork Constraint Computation Centre, Ireland

Publicity Chair
Ian Miguel, University of St. Andrews, Scotland

Sponsorship Chair
Michela Milano, Universita di Bologna, Italy

Program Committee
Gautamkumar Appa, London School of Economics, UK
Philippe Baptiste, Ecole Polytechnique, France
Roman Bartak, Charles University, Czech Republic
Mats Carlsson, SICS, Sweden
Ondrej Cepek, Charles University, Czech Republic
Hani El Sakkout, CISCO, UK
Bernard Gendron, CRT and Univ. of Montreal, Canada
Carmen Gervet, IC-Parc, UK
Carla Gomes, Cornell University, USA
Narendra Jussien, Ecole des Mines de Nantes, France
Stefan Karisch, Carmen Systems, Canada
Francois Laburthe, Bouygues, France
Andrea Lodi, Univ. of Bologna, Italy
Michela Milano, Univ. of Bologna, Italy
Gilles Pesant, CRT and Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal, Canada
Jean-Francois Puget, ILOG, France
Jean-Charles Regin, ILOG, France
Michel Rueher, Univ. of Nice-Sophia Antipolis, France
Meinolf Sellmann, Brown University, USA
Helmut Simonis, IC-Parc, UK
Gilles Trombettoni, Univ. of Nice-Sophia Antipolis, France
Michael Trick, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Pascal van Hentenryck, Brown University, USA
Mark Wallace, Monash University, Australia
Weixiong Zhang, Washington University, USA