Managing Constraints with Preferences and Uncertainty

Date
2011-04-02
Authors
Ayed, Eisa
Mouhoub, Malek
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Regina Graduate Students' Association
Abstract

Reasoning about preferences and uncertainty is very relevant in constraint optimization. Indeed, many real-life problems under constraints such as timetabling, scheduling, planning and logistics, involve a certain amount of preferences expressed in a qualitative way, i.e.," I prefer X more than Y" or in a quantitative way, i.e., "I prefer X with preference P" where P is a numerical value. In addition, many of these problems include uncertainty due to missing or imprecise information. We present a study of different methods combining quantitative and qualitative preferences in constraint problems. We also investigated the integration of incomplete knowledge in such problems. Finally, we propose a new model including preferences and uncertainty. The new model uses branch and bound technique for exploring the search space and it has been implemented in Java programming language.

Description
Keywords
Preferences, Soft constraints, Uncertainty
Citation