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International Workshop on Reformulating Constraint Satisfaction Problems: Towards Systematisation and Automation http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~frisch/Reformulation/ To be held at: The 8th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP 2002) Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA 8 September 2002 Many companies have scheduling, assignment, supply chain and other problems that could be solved with a constraint programming toolkit. Although the solution of these problems is of vital commercial importance, constraint programming toolkits are not widely used because there is insufficient expertise available to model problems as constraint programs. This formulation bottleneck can be reduced by the development of systems that can take a problem specification from a non-expert and automatically reformulate it into a form that can be solved efficiently. The facilities and capabilities of such a system might include a high-level language for specifying constraint satisfaction problems, a compiler to translate high level specifications to executable models, a module system that facilitates the modelling of large-scale and complex CSPs and reformulation methods that can exploit models constructed in this manner, the construction of a more abstract formulation whose solution can aid in solving the original problem, the generation of implied constraints, the detection and breaking symmetry, the removal of redundant constraints, the transformation of constraints, the translation into Boolean satisfiability, and the execution of large-scale changes of representation such as changing the choice of variables. Researchers in the field of constraint programming have written numerous papers showing how particular complex problems can be formulated as a constraint program. We now have sufficient examples from which to abstract generalisations that ultimately can be systematised and embedded in automated reformulation systems. This ``International Workshop on Reformulating Constraint Satisfaction Problems: Towards Systematisation and Automation'' has been convened to provide a forum for researchers who share the goal of making such a reformulation system a reality.
