Graphically structured value-function compilation

  • Authors:
  • Ronen I. Brafman;Carmel Domshlak

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Science, Ben-Gurion University, Beer Sheva, Israel 84105;Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management, Technion---Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel 32000

  • Venue:
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Classical work on eliciting and representing preferences over multi-attribute alternatives has attempted to recognize conditions under which value functions take on particularly simple and compact form, making their elicitation much easier. In this paper we consider preferences over discrete domains, and show that for a certain class of simple and intuitive qualitative preference statements, one can always generate compact value functions consistent with these statements. These value functions maintain the independence structure implicit in the original statements. For discrete domains, these representation theorems are much more general than previous results. However, we also show that it is not always possible to maintain this compact structure if we add explicit ordering constraints among the available outcomes.