CP 2026 — Constraint Programming at FLoC, Lisbon
📅 Monday, 20 July 2026 → Thursday, 23 July 2026 in 30 days
The leading annual meeting on computing with constraints — the solvers, models and algorithms behind planning, scheduling and combinatorial decision-making, increasingly fused with machine learning.
CP 2026 is the 32nd edition of the field's flagship conference, run by the Association for Constraint Programming and hosted within the Federated Logic Conference (FLoC) in Lisbon. Constraint programming sits squarely in the symbolic-AI tradition: it is the science of declaratively stating a combinatorial problem — the variables, domains and constraints — and letting a solver search for solutions. The programme spans constraint solvers and their algorithms, modelling languages, and applications in planning, scheduling, configuration and computational sustainability: the engines behind automated decision-making that must be correct and optimal, not merely plausible.
The 2026 edition is notably oriented toward the AI mainstream. The official scope foregrounds machine learning and artificial intelligence as headline application domains, and the call invites work exploring CP's role within ML — from learning to solve constraints faster to embedding constraints inside learned models for safer, structure-respecting AI. Sponsorship by the Artificial Intelligence Journal and EurAI underlines that the constraints community treats itself as part of AI. Co-located with SAT and the wider FLoC programme, CP 2026 is a strong stop for anyone interested in the optimisation-and-reasoning side of AI rather than only its neural side.
