This volume contains the original contributions accepted for presentation at the 12th International Conference of the Catalan Association for Artificial Intelligence (CCIA'09), held in the ancient salt mining town of Cardona, on October 21–23, 2009.

The Catalan Association for Artificial Intelligence (ACIA),

AClA is a member of ECCAI, the European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence (http://www.acia.org). Its name is an acronym of Associació Catalana d'Intel·ligència Artificial.

The collaboration between ACIA members and the world AI community at large is well-established for many decades now. The papers submitted to the conference reflect that long-standing collaboration; most of its authors come from Catalan-speaking regions of Spain, but also from neighboring countries such as France and Italy, and farther countries such as Mexico and Australia. Over the years, CCIA has become steadily more international as the conference settled itself. This international character can also be noted in the present edition in the scientific committee composition, with 20% of it constituted of reputed researchers from the international AI community.

Each of the 60 papers submitted to CCIA'09 was carefully reviewed by at least 2 program committee members and finally 47 papers have been accepted for presentation during the conference. Of those contributions, the 45 original ones are presented in this volume as well as a brief summary of the two invited talks. The accepted papers, from most of the areas of AI, were divided into 27 oral presentations and 20 posters, but no difference has been made in the proceedings, as the division was not based in quality but on the suitability of each paper for one or the other kind of presentation.

Of all the areas of Computer Science, AI is the one most intertwined with all sorts of disciplines dealt with in the human experience, often employing lessons from one discipline to achieve a task in another one. For example, algorithms that mimic the behavior of humble creatures can be applied to the search for celestial bodies in the depths of the universe. This diversity is also reflected in the invited talks in this conference: one involving music, Scientific and technological challenges of musical interest, presented by Prof. Xavier Serra, and the other involving animal cognition, How great apes think, presented by Prof. Josep Call.

We would like to express our sincere gratitude to all the authors, who chose this conference to send their work, and to the members of the organizing committee, who took care of the uncountable detailed tasks necessary to have a successful conference. We heartily thank all the members of the Scientific Committee and other reviewers for the hard task of judging the submitted papers. Special thanks go also to the plenary speakers for their effort in preparing very interesting lectures and, last but not least, to the president of the ACIA, Núria Agell, for her kind and constant support.

Cardona, October 2009

Sandra Sandri, Institut d'Investigació en Intel·ligència Artificial, CSIC

Miquel Sànchez-Marrè, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya

Ulises Cortés, Universitat Politécnica de Catalunya