DSCP'05 is the first edition of this international workshop, on Distributed and Speculative Constraint Processing. It will be held on September 25th, 2006, in conjunction with the 12th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP'2006), in Nantes, France.



Overview:

DSCP'06 addresses constraint processing techniques in distributed environments, with a special interest on speculative computations.

A distributed constraint satisfaction problem (usually referred to as DisCSP) is a constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) in which multiple agents are involved. DisCSPs arise when pieces of the whole problem can be discharged / allocated to agents. These agents are generally independent (autonomous), but able to communicate, basically to let the others know (depending on the communication protocol) the result of their inner solving process. Pieces of the global problem may be, depending on the problem, variables, or constraints, or both.

Many problems in Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) can be formalized as DisCSPs. Therefore, we expect this workshop to impact a wide range of people, more specifically a lot of people involved in both CSP and MAS, or in either of these. Multi-agent systems are indeed very fashionable and convenient, for they make it possible, for instance, to take advantage of multi-processor machines, and for they also make it possible to design human-like efficient organizations of agents.

In addition to work on plain DisCSP, our workshop aims at emphasizing the process of speculative computations among agents. Indeed, even if multi-agent systems are very fashionable and convenient, their main limitation is that, as arises in human organizations, communication may be an issue: delayed or broken, it leads to incompleteness of the information in the reasoning structure. This is a concrete concern when we consider distributed systems such as the Internet, in which communication is indeed not guaranteed, and even if we could guarantee it, communication may either take time, or agents themselves may delay their sending information. In the case of such not ideal but practical situations, when problem-solving is at stake, frameworks for speculative computations can constitute a solution. Some work was already carried out on speculative constraint processing, but only in master-slave systems.

Scope of DSCP:

In this workshop, we would be pleased to gather together researchers interested in all aspects of distributed and/or speculative constraint solving, such as:
  • frameworks for DisCSPs
  • algorithms
  • communication protocols in DisCSPs
  • theoretical issues, such as space complexity
  • handling over-constrained DisCSPs, as well as performing optimization using DisCSPs
  • applications of DisCSPs
  • frameworks for speculative computations in MAS
  • theoretical work on communication protocols for speculative computation in MAS
  • algorithms for DisCSP solving with speculative computation
  • applications
  • ...
    We encourage in particular the submission of work in progress, of work on very specialized aspects of distributed and/or speculative constraint processing, and of work emphasizing real applications of DSCP.

    Submission:

    The deadline for submission is June 19th, 2006. Prospective authors have to submit a paper, which can be up to 15 pages in length. Authors will submit their papers electronically, in postscript or pdf format. Papers should be formatted using the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) style (click     here, for latex and word packages for this style). Please send your submissions by email to mceberio@utep.edu, with DSCP'06 Workshop Submission, as the subject of the email.

     Important note:

    The workshop is open to the entire community. All participants will have to pay the registration fee that entitles them to participate in all CP workshops, and at least one author of each accepted paper must attend the workshop.

    Important dates:
  • Paper Submission deadline
    		•  June, 19th
  • Notification of acceptance
    		• July, 17th
  • Camera-ready version deadline    
    		•  August, 11th
  • Workshop Date
    		• September, 25th

     Organizing committee:

  • Martine Ceberio (Primary contact)
    University of Texas at El Paso - USA
    e-mail: mceberio@utep.edu
    url: http://www.cs.utep.edu/mceberio

  • Enrico Pontelli
    New Mexico State University -- USA
    e-mail: epontell@cs.nmsu.edu

  • Boi Faltings
    EPFL -- Swiss Federal Institute of Technology -- Switzerland
    e-mail: Boi.Faltings@epfl.ch

  • Hiroshi Hosobe
    National Institute of Informatics -- Tokyo -- Japan
    e-mail: hosobe@nii.ac.jp

  • Francois Modave
    University of Texas at El Paso - USA
    e-mail: fmodave@utep.edu

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