Modeling and Generating Tradeoos for Constraint-based Connguration

During an interactive connguration session we may reach a point where our desires can not be met. At this point we can consider \tradeoos". Ideally, we would like the conngurator to suggest appropriate tradeoos to us. In this paper we have modeled tradeoos in constraint-based connguration as additional constraints, and begun to study the issues involved in generating and evaluating such tradeoos. We describe our basic approach in the context of a \toy" connguration problem based on the classic N-Queens problem. Initial experiments compare \proposal strategies" for generating tradeoos. We lay out a program for further study, outlining the parameters of the problem space to be explored.