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                  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/

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                              Call for Paper
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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)