This year, the RCRA working group organizes the following events:

Special RCRA Session on "Experimentation of Combinatorial Algorithms"
at the XI Conference of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence (AI*IA 2009)

and

16th RCRA International Workshop on "Experimental evaluation of algorithms for solving
problems with combinatorial explosion" (RCRA 2009)

co-located with the XI Conference of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence (AI*IA 2009)


Reggio Emilia, Italy, 11-12 December 2009.


These events follow the series of the RCRA (Knowledge Representation and Automated Reasoning) annual meetings, held since 1994. The success of the previous events shows that RCRA is becoming a major forum for exchanging ideas and proposing experimentation methodologies for algorithms in artificial intelligence.
 

Aims and scope

Many problems in Artificial Intelligence show an exponential explosion of the search space. Although stemming from different research areas in AI, such problems are often addressed with algorithms that have a common goal: the effective exploration of huge state spaces. Many algorithms developed in one research area are applicable to other problems, or can be hybridised with techniques in other areas. Artificial Intelligence tools often exploit or hybridise techniques developed by other research communities, such as
Operations Research.

In recent years, research in AI has more and more focussed on experimental evaluation of algorithms, the development of suitable methodologies for experimentation and analysis, the study of languages and the implementation of systems for the definition and solution of problems.

Scope of the workshop is fostering the cross-fertilisation of ideas stemming from different areas, proposing benchmarks for new challenging problems, comparing models and algorithms from an experimental viewpoint, and, in general, comparing different approaches with respect to efficiency, problem modelling, and ease of development.

Submissions and publication

 Submissions to either event are solicited. In particular, we accept the following types of submissions:

1. Original papers submitted to AI*IA 2009. Deadline: 15 may 2009 24 may 2009.
   Accepted papers will be published in the AI*IA 2009 proceedings as a volume of  Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (Springer-Verlag).
   Authors are encouraged to submit to AI*IA 2009, indicating clearly that the main topic of the paper is "Experimentation of Combinatorial Algorithms".
   
   
   
   
2. Original and already published papers submitted directly to the RCRA 2009 workshop. Deadline: 1 september 2009 6 september 2009 (abstracts) - 15 september 2009 (papers).
   

As in previous editions, authors of papers presented at either event will have the opportunity to participate to the selection of a special issue that will appear in an International journal. The 2009 special issue will be published in Fundamenta Informaticae (IOS Press).