This was a joint workshop of CP2017, ICLP2017 and SAT2017 . It was held on August 28, 2017 in Melbourne, Australia.

Twenty years previously the paper “In Pursuit of the Holy Grail” proposed that Constraint Programming was well-positioned to pursue the Holy Grail of computer science: the user simply states the problem and the computer solves it. This workshop looked at progress towards that goal, specifically regarding work on automating:

• Problem Acquisition: learning from examples, model reformulation, etc.
• Solver Construction: tuning parameters, selecting from portfolios, etc.
• User Explanation: reasons for failure, implications of choices, etc.

The increasing interest in Human-Aware AI and intelligent software assistants made this a particularly timely topic.

Invited Talks

Helmut Simonis: The ModelSeeker – Learning Structured Constraint Models from Example Solutions

Peter Stuckey: “I heard what you said but I knew what you meant” Automatic transformation of models in MiniZinc

Lars Kotthoff: Intelligent Constraint Programming: Algorithm Selection for Fun and Profit

Maria de la Banda: Visualising and profiling CP models: is the Holy Grail in sight?

Submitted Papers

Ekaterina Arafailova, Nicolas Beldiceanu and Helmut Simonis: Beyond the Holy Grail – Automatically Generating Constraint Propagators for Conjunctions of Time-Series Constraints

Walter Wilson: A More General Specification Language

Gopal Gupta: Next Generation Logic Programming Systems: Reaching for the Holy Grail of Computer Science

Vincent Armant, Kenneth N. Brown, Barry O’Sullivan, Luis Quesada, Mohamed Siala, and Mohamed Wahbi: Some challenges in Game Theory solvable via CP

Zakarya Erraji , Imade Benelallam , and El Houssine Bouyakhf: Towards a Constraint Programming approach for Cognitive IoT

Panel

Once and Future

At CP 2006, there was a workshop on The Next 10 Years of Constraint Programming. There was a Constraint Programming Letters special issue and a book chapter (chapter 3 of Trends in Constraint Programming) that grew out of the 2006 workshop. This Panel was designed to look back at that workshop to see how the proposals and predictions panned out, and to discuss where we go from here. The subject of the Panel is broader than the subject of the Workshop, of course, but overlaps. In particular: where do we go from here in Pursuit of the Holy Grail?

Panelists: John Hooker, Mark Wallace, Roland Yap

Moderator: Eugene Freuder

Organizing Committee

Eugene Freuder, University College Cork, Ireland (Chair), eugene.freuder@insight-centre.org

Christian Bessiere, CNRS – Université Montpellier, France

Narendra Jussien, École des Mines Albi, France

Lars Kotthoff, University of British Columbia, Canada

Mark Wallace, Monash University, Australia