Call for Application Papers

CP 2012 again wishes to promote the presentation of CP applications. We especially look for industrial and academic users of constraint technology to submit papers on completed or on-going practical projects. Papers comparing constraint technology to other optimization techniques (MIP, local search, SAT, etc.) with a sound experimental evaluation are also encouraged.

Papers which clearly define users' benefits, describe the required effort to build the application and the time frame in which it was delivered, will match the acceptance criteria most closely. The novelty of the application domain, while potentially a plus, is not the only deciding acceptance criterion.

• Application papers will be reviewed by a program committee with significant experience in the use of CP in applications.
• The writing of the paper should be guided by providing answers to four main questions (outlined below).

The conference proceedings will be published by Springer Verlag in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series. Full paper submissions are limited to 15 LNCS pages plus references, while Short paper submissions are limited to 8 pages plus references. Short papers will be reviewed to the same standards of quality as full papers, but will naturally contain less quantity of new materials.

Selected papers submitted to the Application track, which receive excellent reviews from the referees will be invited to submit a revised paper for fast track review in the Constraints journal.

Important Dates

• Deadline for abstract submission: April 19, 2012 at 23.59 EDT
• Deadline for Submissions: April 23, 2012 April 27th, 2012 at 23.59 EDT
• Provisional Reviews to authors: May 25, 2012
• Authors feedback due: May 27, 2012
• Notification of Acceptance: June 3, 2012
• Camera Ready Manuscript due: July 9, 2012

Suggested Outline

• Title; Authors/Company

• Section 1 - The problem

  • context, description, definition...
  • size of the application (constraint part/others)?
  • how important is the problem? (impact...) in which terms? (monetary, safety, social, etc.)
  • what is a solution to this problem? (decision, exemplification, enumeration, counting, optimisation, approximation, etc.)

• Section 2 - Why CP?

  • what was used before? (hand made, LP...)
  • why change? (didn't it work well? difficult to maintain? ...)
  • why/how did you come to CP?

• Section 3 - How CP?

  • model, implementation
  • pure CP or hybrid? (is CP used in conjunction with other problem solving techniques such as LP/MIP, SAT, custom heuristic?) which decomposition method?
  • techniques such as LP/MIP, SAT, custom heuristic?) which decomposition method?

• Section 4 - Added Value of CP?

  • cost of development? / time spent developing the application?
  • how long has it been in production mode (if development completed)?
  • what is the feedback from user experience (if applicable)?
  • was it difficult/necessary for the end-user to understand constraint technology?
  • what is the return on investment (if applicable)?
  • do you plan any new CP based development?
  • what are the lessons learned from the use of CP?