Preference Elicitation for DCOPs

Distributed Constraint Optimization Problems (DCOPs) offer a powerful approach for the description and resolution of cooperative multi-agent problems. In this model, a group of agents coordinate their actions to optimize a global objective function, taking into account their preferences or constraints. A core limitation of this model is the assumption that the preferences of all agents or the costs of all constraints are specified a priori. Unfortunately, this assumption does not hold in a number of application domains where preferences or constraints must be elicited from the users. One of such domains is the Smart Home Device Scheduling (SHDS) problem. Motivated by this limitation, we make the following contributions in this paper: (1) We propose a general model for preference elicitation in DCOPs; (2) We propose several heuristics to elicit preferences in DCOPs; and (3) We empirically evaluate the effect of these heuristics on random binary DCOPs as well as SHDS problems.