**************************** Call for Papers *********************************
**                                                                          **
**                           Special Issue on                               **
**                 SAT 2014 COMPETITIONS AND EVALUATIONS                    **
**                                                                          **
**    Journal on Satisfiability, Boolean Modeling and Computation (JSAT)    **
**                     http://satassociation.org/jsat/                      **
**                 ISSN: 1574-0617, published by OIS Press                  **
**                                                                          **
** Guest editors: Marijn Heule      The University of Texas at Austin, USA  **
**                Matti Jarvisalo   University of Helsinki, Finland         **
**                                                                          **
******************************************************************************

Important dates

Submission to the special issue is now open.

Submission deadline: December 12, 2014
First round reviews: February 15, 2015
Revision deadline: April 15, 2015
Final notifications: June 15, 2015

Final versions of accepted articles will be published online individually as soon as received by the journal editors. The special issue will appear either as part of a regular volume or as a specific volume depending on the number of accepted papers.

Motivation

Boolean satisfiability (SAT) and related solver competitions organized during the last two decades have been a stimulating force to improve SAT solvers and related technologies. These competitions have encouraged developing novel algorithms, optimized implementation-level techniques and data structures to increase the practical performance and robustness of solvers. The competition benchmark suites are commonly used by the research community as the standard test set to evaluate progress. Additionally, the competitions provide large amounts of openly available data on solver performance on a large spectrum of benchmark families that encode important real and artificial combinatorial problems.

A lot more can be learned from these solver competitions than merely awarding and publishing the best-performing solvers. This special issue provides a venue to go beyond this, and welcomes research articles offering in-depth understanding of different aspects of the 2014 SAT-related solver competitions, inviting submissions describing solver techniques, benchmark families, competition reports, and thorough analysis and insights into the data produced by the competitions.

Topics of interest

Manuscripts addressing one or more of the following aspects of 2014 SAT-related solver competitions are invited.

• Articles (full or system descriptions) presenting details on the algorithmic and implementation-level aspects of original solvers with remarkable performance during the SAT-related competitions within FLoC Olympic Games 2014:
  
  
  • SAT Competition,
  • Configurable SAT Solver Challenge,
  • MaxSAT Evaluation,
  • QBF Gallery,
  • Satisfiability Modulo Theories Competition,
  as well as other FLoC Olympic Games 2014 competitions tightly connected with Boolean satisfiability, such as the Hardware Model Checking Competition. Remarkable is to be interpreted broadly, from good overall performance to very good performance on a specific set of benchmarks.


• Full articles by competition organizers reporting on SAT-related competitions within FLoC Olympic Games 2014. The articles should describe the competition, its criteria, why it is interesting to the SAT research community, execution environment used, analysis of the results (including how they compare to previous instantiations, if appropriate), and give a summary of the main technical contributions to the field, as well as discussions on lessons learned and suggestions for improvements for future competitions.


• Full articles presenting non-trivial in-depth analysis of the data produced by SAT-related competitions within FLoC Olympic Games 2014. The articles should give novel insights into the competition data, analyzing for example the structure of competition benchmarks and their relation to the effectiveness of different solver techniques in solving the benchmarks, scoring methods for ranking solvers, sensitivity of competition results, etc.


• Full articles on new, relevant benchmark families submitted to the competitions, and related analysis of the competition benchmarks.

Submission Information

Submissions should be written using the JSAT latex style files. System description submissions are limited to six pages in the JSAT style. Submission of manuscripts to the special issue are made via the JSAT journal website http://satassociation.org/jsat/ by following the link "INFORMATION -> For Authors". After registering to the JSAT submission system, start a new submission, and select "Special Issue on SAT 2014 Competitions and Evaluations" in the Journal Section selection menu in Step 1 of the submission procedure.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under review for publication elsewhere.

Please contact the special issue editors by email using satcompetitions2014@gmail.com in case you have any questions regarding the special issue.