Introducing Variable Importance Tradeoffs into CP-Nets

The ability to make decisions and to assess po­ tential courses of action is a comer-stone of many AI applications, and usually this requires explicit information about the decision-maker's prefer­ ences. In many applications, preference elic­ itation is a serious bottleneck. The user ei­ ther does not have the time, the knowledge, or the expert support required to specify complex multi-attribute utility functions. In such cases, a method that is based on intuitive, yet expressive, preference statements is required. In this paper we suggest the use of TCP-nets, an enhancement of CP-nets, as a tool for representing, and reason­ ing about qualitative preference statements. We present and motivate this framework, define its semantics, and show how it can be used to per­ form constrained optimization.