The Twenty-Sixth Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP 2020 - http://cp2020.a4cp.org/) will take place in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, September 7 to 11, 2020. Due to the on-going Coronavirus crisis, we plan to at least partially virtualize the conference, so that participants can attend and present papers remotely, if travel to the conference location is not possible.

The CP conference series concerns all aspects of computing with constraints, including: theory, algorithms, environments, languages, models, systems, and applications.

The CP 2020 programme will include presentations of high-quality scientific papers and tutorials on both theory and applications. Invited talks will describe important topics relevant to the field. The CP programme also welcomes workshops for discussing in-progress work and provides support to students through its doctoral program, which includes a dedicated one day doctoral conference, mentorship by experienced researchers and more. Special "Industrial Day" events will be part of the conference, to allow for more interaction with industry.

----- Tracks -----

The conference features a main Technical Track, and additional thematic tracks:
* Application Track
* Computational Sustainability
* CP, Data science and Machine Learning
* CP and Operations Research
* Testing and Verification
* Sister Conference Track

Papers are submitted directly to each track. Submissions that relate not only to CP technology but to constraint solving, NP-hard problem solving and optimization in general, and which are of potential interest to the CP community, are welcome. Papers in specialized tracks will be reviewed by experts in that area.


----- Important dates -----

All deadlines are AoE.

Abstract Submission, Sunday May 24th, 2020
Paper submission deadline, Friday May 29th, 2020
Author response period, June 29-1st July, 2020
Notification, Wednesday, July 8th, 2020
Camera ready copy, Monday, July 20th, 2020

----- Submissions Instructions -----

Paper submission is via EasyChair (CP 2020 - https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=cp2020). Each submission should be directed to the suitable track.

----- Length and format -----

The submissions should be submitted in the form of a PDF file following Springer's LNCS formatting guidelines (https://www.springer.com/gp/computer-science/lncs/conference-proceedings-guidelines). In order to open the conference more widely (e.g., for OR persons), two types of submissions are expected this year:

* full papers: they can use up to 15 pages (references not included) but shorter submissions are also welcome. Submissions exceeding the page limits or improperly formatted will be rejected without review.
* abstracts: they can use a maximum of 2 pages and can cover material which has already been submitted or published in other journals or conferences. The abstracts will not appear in the final LNCS proceedings but will be available on the conference web site and be distributed as an abstract leaflet.

All full papers and those abstracts which should attract a wide audience will be allocated time for presentation during the conference. Other abstracts will be allocated poster space.

----- Anonymous Submission -----

To facilitate reviewing management, authors who intend to submit a paper to CP should submit an abstract of the contents and contribution of the final submission, with a maximum of 150 words, before Sunday, May 24th, 2020.

The completed paper submission must be done before Friday, May 29th 2020. Full papers will go through a double blind reviewing process, meaning that authors and reviewers are anonymous to each other. For this reason, submitted full papers should not contain author names, affiliations, or links to identifying web sites. References should be cited in such a way as not to reveal the authorship of the paper.

----- Multiple Submission -----

A given paper must be submitted to exactly one track. When it looks necessary, the Program Chairs may move a submission to another, more suitable track.

At the final submission deadline, any full paper submission that appeared in, is accepted for, or is under review for another peer-reviewed conference or journal must be promptly withdrawn from CP.

Submissions that have appeared at workshops or other meetings of lower status than a conference or only in highly shortened form (e.g., abstracts) can be submitted as full papers.

----- Proceedings -----

Accepted full papers (in all tracks) will appear in conference proceedings published by Springer in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series. The proceedings will be available at the time of the conference.

Authors of certain outstanding accepted full papers will be offered two publication options: (a) publication in the conference proceedings and, if desired, submission of an extended version to a special issue of Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research; (b) publication of an abstract in the conference proceedings, and publication of an extended version of the paper on the conference web site and in the Constraints journal after the conference.

----- Other Information -----

Questions about the paper submission process may be addressed to the Program Chair Helmut Simonis (helmut.simonis@insight-centre.org).