RCRA 2014 PROCEEDINGS: EDITOR'S PREFACE

This volume contains the papers presented at RCRA 2014: 21st RCRA International Workshop on "Experimental Evaluation of Algorithms for solving problems with combinatorial explosion" held on July 16-17, 2014 in Vienna.

The workshop is part of FLoC 2014 at VSL 2014 and is co-located with ICLP 2014, IJCAR 2014 and SAT 2014.

The RCRA 2014 Programme Committee accepted 14 submissions, of which 7 original full papers, 4 original short papers, and 3 papers already published at conferences. Each submission was reviewed by at least 3, and on the average 3.9, Program Committee members. Already published papers have been reviewed in order to evaluate their appropriateness to the call for papers.

Workshop aims, scope and history

Many problems in Artificial Intelligence (AI) 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 this workshop series 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.

The RCRA workshops are organised by "Rappresentazione della Conoscenza e Ragionamento Automatico" (RCRA, http://rcra.aixia.it), which is a scientific community interested in Knowledge Representation and Automated Reasoning. The RCRA group, founded in 1993, is part of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence (AI*IA, http://www.aixia.it). 

The last editions of this workshop series have been as follows:

• RCRA 2013, Rome, Italy - http://rcra.aixia.it/rcra2013
  Extended versions of the best papers will appear in a special issue of Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence
• RCRA 2012 as a workshop of AI*IA 2012, Rome, Italy - http://rcra.aixia.it/rcra2012
  Extended versions of the best papers will appear in a special issue of AI Communications
• RCRA 2011 as a workshop of IJCAI 2011, Barcelona, Spain - http://rcra.aixia.it/rcra2011
  Extended versions of the best papers appear in a special issue of AI Communications

Information on previous editions are available at http://rcra.aixia.it/workshops