Although Constraint Programming (CP) plays an increasingly important role in optimization and modeling, very few U.S. universities offer training in the field. In particular, there is limited awareness in the U.S. operations research (OR) community of the benefits of combining OR and CP, even though several commercial and non-commercial solvers now make it possible to do so. A tutorial is therefore designed for AI and particularly OR people who want to learn what CP is all about. It presupposes no background in CP. Top people in the field will serve as instructors. This grant provides financial support to PhD students who want to attend the tutorial, and provides modest support for instructor participation. The CP tutorial takes place on May 27-28, 2009 and precedes the main conference, CPAIOR on 29-31 May, 2009 at the Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University (http://web.tepper.cmu.edu/CPAIOR09). The tutorial represents a valuable integration of research and education, and the tutorial and conference are likely to increase the visibility of constraint programming (CP) in the United States.
