Introduction to the special volume on constraint programming, artificial intelligence, and operations research

Abstract

The Third International Conference on Integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Operations Research (OR) Techniques in Constraint Programming (CP) for Combinatorial Optimization Problems (CPAIOR 2006) was held in Cork, Ireland, from May 31–June 2, 2006. The conference received 67 submissions. After a full reviewing process, 20 papers were chosen for presentation at the conference and publication in the proceedings. Of these 20, and after a second full refereeing process, seven papers have been selected to appear here in significantly extended form. The goal of the CPAIOR conference series is to provide a forum for researchers to present approaches that highlight the integration of CP, AI, and OR techniques as well as to encourage cross-fertilization between traditionally separate communities that have a significant overlap in terms of research approaches, algorithms, and problems of interest. The papers in this Special Volume reflect the diversity and range of the conference. At one extreme, the problem of representing and reasoning about preferences in concert with constraints is a problem that has mostly arisen in the AI community. In their paper, Wallace & Wilson show how a lexicographic preference representation can be used to express various kinds of preference information and how the representation can be integrated with constraint programming. At the other extreme, Cadoli & Patrizi address the problem of separability of sub-problems in a Benders decomposition framework. Such decomposition methods, traditionally seen as OR techniques, have received significant interest from the CP community over the past five years. Hybrid approaches that combine algorithms and approaches from different domains are of particular interest to the CPAIOR community. Two papers here investigate hybrid ap-