Scientific context

The success of SAT technology in the last decade is mainly due to both the availability of numerous efficient SAT solvers and to the growing number of problems that can efficiently be solved through a translation into SAT. If the main application in the early 2000 was bounded model checking, the current applications range from formal verification (in both software and hardware) to bioinformatics. The benefit of the incredible improvements in the design of efficient SAT solvers those recent years is now reaching our lives: The Intel Core7 processor for instance has been designed with the help of SAT technology, while the device drivers of Windows 7 are being certified thanks to an SMT solver (based on a SAT solver).

Designing efficient SAT solvers requires both a good theoretical knowledge about the design of SAT solvers, i.e. how are interacting all its components, and a deep practical knowledge about how to implement efficiently such components.

The SAT community organizes regularly SAT competitive events (SAT competition or SAT Races) to evaluate available SAT solvers on a wide range of problems. The winners of those events set regularly new standards in the area.

If the systems themselves are widely spread, many details on their design or in their implementation can only be found in the source code of the systems. This is also true for the encoding of some constraints. It is usually the case that system descriptions provided for the competitive events are not detailed and that the SAT conference publishes very few system descriptions since 2005 (before that, the post proceedings could contain the system description of the competition winners, e.g. Minisat for SAT'03 and Chaff 2004 for SAT'04).

The aim of the pragmatics of SAT workshop is to allow researchers concerned with the design of efficient SAT solvers at large or SAT encodings to meet and discuss about their latest results. The workshop is also the place for users of SAT technology to present their applications.

The first edition of that workshop took place during FLoC 2010. It ended up to be a great success, with more than 30 participants highly interested in the practical aspects of SAT and related problems. The second edition took place before SAT 2011, in Ann Arbor. It attracted also around 30 participants, and broadened the scope of the initial workshop to several applications (ATPG, software dependency management, etc). The third edition took place on June 16, 2012, between the second SAT/SMT Summer School (June 12 to 15) and the SAT conference (June 17-20). The workshop was a success (around 60 participants), many of them coming from the SMT summer school. The fourth edition took place on July 8, 2013, between the third SAT/SMT school and the SAT 2013 conference. The workshop attracted about 50 participants. The fifth edition took place the day before the SAT 2014 conference and the workshop attracted about 30 participants. The sixth edition took place the day before the SAT 2015 conference and the workshop attracted about 30 participants.

The seventh edition is taking place the day before the SAT 2016 conference.

Schedule

You may also want to look at the EasyChair program of POS-16, SAT 2016, QBF 2016 or STRUCTSAT 2016.

Remember that work in progress (WIP) papers are only distributed to the audience of the workshop.

Topics

Main areas of interest include, but are not restricted to:

• techniques for debugging or certifying solvers
• visualisation of benchmarks structure
• monitoring solver behaviour
• evaluation of solvers
• efficient data structures
• domain specific encodings
• taking into account multi-core technology
• domain specific heuristics
• new application of sat technology
• new use cases of sat technology
• system/library description
• SAT/SMT solver API

Submission

The workshop welcomes three categories of papers:

• Regular papers describing original work on a topic of the workshop, whose focus is too narrow to be published in a conference. Those papers are meant to be published in the workshop archival proceedings (Easychair Proceedings in Computing)
• Work in progress papers describing less mature work on a topic of the workshop, to gather feedback from the community. Those papers will be distributed to the audience of the workshop only.
• Presentation papers describing a work on a topic of the workshop published recently to another conference, but that the community may have missed. Those papers will only be evaluated on their relevance to the workshop, and will not be distributed to the audience (a link to the original paper will be given).

Each submission will be reviewed by at least three members of the programme committee.

The papers must be submitted electronically through EasyChair as a PDF file using the EasyChair proceedings style. Each submission is limited to 14 pages, plus references. Accepted regular and work in progress papers will be available to the audience of the workshop and regular papers will be published in a volume of EasyChair in Computing electronic proceedings.

The SAT conference is now accepting tool papers, so there is no need to the push system descriptions as it has been done in the past. We welcome however extended versions of tool papers for detailed presentation during the workshop.

Note that it is still possible to submit system descriptions to the JSAT journal, at any time.

Authors should provide enough information and/or data for reviewers to confirm any performance claims. This includes links to a runnable system, access to benchmarks, reference to a public performance results, etc.

We warmly encourage the authors of the systems that enter SAT 2016 competitive events to consider submitting a description of their solver to PoS, especially if they did not submit a tool paper to the main conferences.

Important dates

• Abstract submission deadline: April 22 May 6, 2016
• Paper submission deadline: April 29 May 8, 2016
• Notification to authors: June 1st June 10, 2016
• Final version due: June 17 June 19, 2016
• Workshop: July 4th, 2016

Programme Committee

• Josep Argelich (Universitat de Lleida, Spain)
• Gilles Audemard (Université d'Artois, France)
• Armin Biere (Johannes Kepler University, Austria)
• Matti Järvisalo (University of Helsinki, Finland)
• Dejan Jovanović (SRI International, USA)
• Marijn Heule (The University of Texas at Austin, USA)
• Ines Lynce (INESC-ID, IST - Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal)
• Vasco Manquinho (INESC-ID, IST - Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal)
• Nina Narodytska (Samsung Research America, USA)
• Albert Oliveras (Technical University of Catalonia, Spain)
• Jordi Planes (Universitat de Lleida, Spain)
• Olivier Roussel (Université d'Artois, France) - chair
• Allen Van Gelder (University of California, USA) - chair

Contact

For any questions related to the workshop, the preferred solution to contact the organizers is to send an email to pos at pragmaticsofsat.org.

Olivier Roussel                                 Allen Van Gelder                                                 
Université d'Artois                             University of California at Santa Cruz       
CNRS                                            School of Engineering                        
Rue de l'Université SP16 62307 Lens FRANCE      1156 High St, Santa Cruz, CA 95064, USA      
http://www.cril.univ-artois.fr/~roussel/        http://www.cse.ucsc.edu/~avg/