============================================================================ ======= 5th International Workshop on Soft Constraints Held in conjunction with 9th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming, CP2003 Actons Hotel, Kinsale, County Cork, Ireland. 29 September - 3 October, 2003 http://www.sci.unich.it/~bista/organizing/soft-2003/ ============================================================================ ======== Call for Paper ============================================================================ ======== Soft-constraints augment the classical CSP framework by allowing the user to express preferences among potential solutions. Given a well-defined mechanism to express and combine preferences, the goal is to find the "best" solution. Therefore, solving soft constraints becomes an optimization task, harder than the satisfaction tasks in classical CSP. Sometimes optimization becomes multi-objective, making the solving process even more complex. The interest of the community on soft constraints has increased in the last years. Several theoretical frameworks have been developed to allow soft constraints in problem modeling. For these frameworks, new algorithms have been built. The main motivation for this line of research is the existence of many real problems involving preferences among potential solutions, which demand an effective solving method. Also in this edition, we want to enlarge the workshop scope by encouraging submissions from domains where soft constraints have specific semantics such as propositional logic formulae (i.e. MAX-SAT), probability distributions (i.e. probabilistic reasoning) or uncertainty. Workshop topics include (but are not limited to): 1. theoretical frameworks for soft constraints 2. problem modeling with soft constraints 3. solving algorithms for soft constraints 4. interlacing satisfaction and optimization techniques 5. multi-objective optimization and soft constraints 6. constraint languages including soft constraints 7. combining/integrating soft constraint frameworks and algorithms into the Constraint Programming framework 8. comparative studies 9. real-life applications Delivery & Submissions This workshop is intended to build on the experience and success of the CP99, CP2000, CP2001 and CP2002 workshops on the same subject, and its aim is to provide a forum where researchers currently working in this area can discuss their most recent ideas and developments and think together about the most promising new directions. Therefore we encourage the presentation of work in progress or on specialized aspects of soft constraints. Papers that bridge the gap between theory and practice are especially welcome. Prospective attendees can Submit a paper, which can be up to 15 pages in length. We encourage authors to submit papers electronically in postscript or pdf format. Papers should be formatted using the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) style. Please send your submissions by email to larrosa@lsi.upc.es using the subject line Soft-2003 Workshop Submission. Important Dates The proposed schedule of important dates for the workshop is as follows: Paper Submission deadline June 24th Notification of acceptance July 24th Camera-ready version deadline August 14th Workshop Date September 29th Workshop Organizers: Stefano Bistarelli Istituto per l'Informatica e la Telematica, C.N.R., Pisa, Italy Stefano.Bistarelli@iit.cnr.it Dipartimento di Scienze, Universita' degli Studi "G. D'Annunzio", Pescara, Italy bista@sci.unich.it Javier Larrosa Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain larrosa@lsi.upc.es Thomas Schiex Institut National de La Recherche Agronomique, Castanet Tolosan Cedex - France tschiex@toulouse.inra.fr Program Committee: Fadi Aloul (Electrical Engineering & Computer Science University of Michigan - Ann Arbor, USA) Hélène Fargier (IRIT, Université Paul Sabatier, France) Thom Fruehwirth (University of Ulm, Germany) Carmen Gervet (IC-Parc, Imperial College, UK) Ulrich Junker (ILOG, France) Jimmy H. M. Lee (The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong) Pedro Meseguer (IIIA-CSIC, Bellaterra, Spain) Barry O'Sullivan (University College Cork, Ireland) Francesca Rossi (University of Padova, Italy)