Introduction to the special issue on Constraint-based approaches to Preference Modelling and Reasoning

摘要

Modelling and reasoning with preferences in constraint-based systems has been considered for a long time as a secondary issue, given the already tremendous difficulties that were raised by just representing and reasoning with set of properties (that is, constraints) that need to be met and used to take decisions or to prove further properties. Indeed, the concise description of required properties offered by constraint networks and propositional logic, combined with a highly combinatorial variable (or attribute) based description of the world, immediately classifies the problem of finding a satisfactory decision as NP-hard.