Elicitation Strategies for Fuzzy Constraint Problems with Missing Preferences: Algorithms and Experimental Studies

Fuzzy constraints are a popular approach to handle preferences and over-constrained problems in scenarios where one needs to be cautious, such as in medical or space applications. We consider here fuzzy constraint problems where some of the preferences may be missing. This models, for example, settings where agents are distributed and have privacy issues, or where there is an ongoing preference elicitation process. In this setting, we study how to find a solution which is optimal irrespective of the missing preferences. In the process of finding such a solution, we may elicit preferences from the user if necessary. However, our goal is to ask the user as little as possible. We define a combined solving and preference elicitation scheme with a large number of different instantiations, each corresponding to a concrete algorithm which we compare experimentally. We compute both the number of elicited preferences and the "user effort", which may be larger, as it contains all the p...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: CP
• Authors: Mirco Gelain, Maria Silvia Pini, Francesca Rossi, Kristen Brent Venable, Toby Walsh
• Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, CP 2008, Preferences, User, User Effort