Heuristic search and other forms of combinatorial search are active areas of research in artificial intelligence, planning, robotics, constraint programming, operations research, bioinformatics, and other areas of computer science. SoCS is meant to bring researchers from these areas together to exchange their ideas and cross-fertilize the field.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to the following:

Analysis of search algorithms
Automated synthesis of lower bounds
Automatic algorithm selection and parameter tuning
Bounding and pruning techniques
Combinatorial puzzles
Continuous problem solving
External-memory and parallel search
Incremental and active learning in search
Meta-reasoning and search
Methodology and critiques of current practice
Model-based search
Random versus systematic search strategy selection
Portfolios of search algorithms
Real-time search
Search in goal-directed problem solving
Search space discretization for continuous state-space problems
Self-configuring and self-tuning algorithms
Symmetry handling
Time, memory, and solution quality trade-offs
Search in big data
Constraint search
Search in robotics
Search-based diagnosis
Real-life applications