Managing Qualitative Preferences with Constraints

Abstract

Preferences and Constraints co-exist naturally in different domains. Thus, handling both of them is of great interest for many real applications. Preferences usually expressed in qualitative format where a constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) is a well known formalism to handle constraints. In this paper, we investigate the problem of managing both qualitative user preferences and system requirements. We model our preference part as an instance of Conditional Preference networks (CP-nets) and the constraints as CSP. We propose a new method to handle both aspects in an efficient manner. Our method is based on the well-known Arc Consistency (AC) propagation technique. The experiments demonstrate that the new approach can save a substantial amount of time for finding the optimal solution for given preferences and constraints.