CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

                              PATAT 2006

                      The 6th International Conference
           on the Practice and Theory of Automated Timetabling

                          http://patat06.muni.cz

            Wednesday, 30th August - Friday, 1st September 2006

          organized by the Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University

                          Hotel International
                                 Brno
                            Czech Republic

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               Late Registration Deadline: August 18th, 2006

                   Conference proceedings available at
              http://patat06.muni.cz/doc/PATAT_2006_Proceedings.pdf
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This conference is the sixth in a series of conferences that serve as
a forum for an international community of researchers, practitioners and
vendors on all aspects of computer-aided timetable generation. For more
information about the series of conferences see

http://www.asap.cs.nott.ac.uk/patat/patat-index.shtml

The themes of the conference include (but are not limited to):

o Educational Timetabling
o Transport Timetabling
o Employee Timetabling and Rostering
o Sports Timetabling
o Complexity Issues
o Distributed Timetabling Systems
o Experiences
o Implementations
o Commercial Packages
o Interactive vs Batch Timetabling
o Timetable Updating
o Data Models and Data Formats
o Relationship with Other Scheduling Problems
o Timetabling Research Areas, including:
               Constraint-Based Methods
               Evolutionary Computation
               Artificial Intelligence
               Graph Colouring
               Expert Systems
               Heuristic Search
               Knowledge Based Systems
               Operational Research
               Simulated Annealing
               Local Search
               Mathematical Programming
               Soft Computing
               Tabu Search
               Meta-Heuristics
               Hyper-Heuristics
               Very Large Neighborhood Search
               Ant Colony Methods
               Hybrid Methods
               Multi-Criteria Decision Making
               Fuzzy Reasoning
               Combinatorial Optimisation

The Featured Keynote Speakers for this conference are:

    Barry McCollum (Queen's University and eventMAP Ltd., UK)
    Michel Gendreau (Centre de Recheche sur les Transports, Montréal, Canada)
    James Orlin (MIT, USA)
    Andrea Schaerf (Universita di Udine, Italy)


Research Presentations:

Seventy research presentations are planned, encompassing the broad range
of issues in timetabling. The conference proceedings with all plenary
presentations, full papers, extended abstracts, and system demonstrations is
available at http://patat06.muni.cz/doc/PATAT_2006_Proceedings.pdf .
The preliminary conference programme is published at
http://patat06.muni.cz/schedule.html .


Registration Fees:

Registration fees include attandence at all presentations (invited talks, full
papers, extended abstracts, system demonstrations), ISBN proceedings
available during the conference, LNCS proceedings of selected papers
published after the conference, 3 lunches (Wednesday-Friday), coffee breaks,
2 dinners (Wednesday and Thursday), city tour on Tuesday evening, and the
use of conference facilities (wireless connection). The registration fees are:

                 Regular: 14,800 CZK early registration
                          16,000 CZK late registration
                          18,000 CZK on-site registration
       First 50 students: 7,500 CZK early registration
                           8,500 CZK late registration
                           9,900 CZK on-site registration
      Remaining students: 9,750 CZK early registration
                          10,750 CZK late registration
                          12,150 CZK on-site registration
           Saturday trip: 950 CZK
     Accompanying person: 2,800 CZK

First 50 registered students receive 2,250 CZK support from PATAT conference.

Please register through the conference web site
http://patat06.muni.cz/online/registration/

LATE REGISTRATION ENDS AUGUST 18, 2006

Saturday trip:

The optional Saturday trip is an excellent opportunity to interact with other
conference attendees in an informal atmosphere. We will visit the Moravian Karst
region, which is very close to Brno. We have planned an excursion to the Punkva
caves where you will enjoy a trip by motorboat on an underground river, the
Punkva. We will also see the Macocha abyss, the deepest open abyss in Central
Europe. Next we will move to the brewery at Cerna Hora where we will have lunch.
We conclude our trip with a tour of the brewery which is one of the oldest
breweries in Moravia and Bohemia.



Accommodation:

PATAT 2006 will be held at the the Hotel International. A block of rooms at
the following discounted rates is being held for PATAT 2006:

              Standard Single Room (1 person): 2250 CZK
                  Executive Single (1 person): 2550 CZK
             Standard Double Room (2 persons): 2760 CZK
                 Executive Double (2 persons): 3420 CZK

A block of rooms at the following rates is being held for PATAT 2006 at
the Student Hostel Astorka with the following rates (rates are on a per person
basis regardless of whether one or two people occupy a double room):

              Nightly Rate per Person (double room): 580 CZK
               Nightly Rate per Person (3 bed room): 440 CZK
      Student Nightly Rate per Person (double room): 290 CZK
       Student Nightly Rate per Person (3 bed room): 220 CZK

Detail information on how to book accommodation can be found at
http://patat06.muni.cz/accommodation.html


Programme Committee:

Edmund Burke (co-chair) University of Nottingham, UK
Hana Rudova (co-chair) Masaryk University, Czech Republic

Hesham Alfares King Fahd University, Saudi Arabia
Viktor Bardadym Noveon Inc., Belgium
James Bean University of Michigan, USA
Peter Brucker University of Osnabrück, Germany
Michael Carter University of Toronto, Canada
Peter Cowling University of Bradford, UK
Patrick De Causmaecker KaHo St.-Lieven, Gent, Belgium
Kathryn Dowsland Gower Optimal Algorithms Ltd. UK
Andreas Drexl University of Kiel, Germany
Wilhelm Erben FH Konstanz - University of Applied Sciences, Germany
Jacques A. Ferland University of Montreal, Canada
Michel Gendreau Centre de Recherche sur les Transports, Montréal, Canada
Alain Hertz Ecole Polytechnique de Montréal, Canada
Jeffrey Kingston University of Sydney, Australia
Raymond Kwan University of Leeds, UK
Gilbert Laporte Université de Montréal, Canada
Vahid Lotfi University of Michigan-Flint, USA
Amnon Meisels Ben-Gurion University, Beer-Sheva, Israel
Thiruthlall Nepal Durban Institute of Technology, South Africa
Jim Newall eventMAP Ltd, UK
Ben Paechter Napier University, Edinburgh, UK
Gilles Pesant Ecole Polytechnique de Montréal, Canada
Sanja Petrovic University of Nottingham, UK
Jean-Yves Potvin Université de Montréal, Canada
Rong Qu University of Nottingham, UK
Andrea Schaerf Universita di Udine, Italy
Jan Schreuder University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands
Jonathan Thompson Cardiff University, UK
Paolo Toth University of Bologna, Italy
Michael Trick Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Greet Vanden Berghe KaHo St.-Lieven, Belgium
Stefan Voss University of Hamburg, Germany
Dominique de Werra EPF-Lausanne, Switzerland
George White University of Ottawa, Canada
Michael Wright Lancaster University, UK
Jay Yellen Rollins College, USA


More informantion available at http://patat06.muni.cz .