Preference Programming for Configuration

Abstract

Preference programming provides a new paradigm for expressing (default) decisions, preferences between decisions, and search strategies in a declarative and unified way and for embedding them in a constraint and rule language. Business experts can thus directly specify preferences and search directives in form of rules without needing to program search strategies as required by constraint programming based configuration tools. Preference programming allows to describe preferences between individual decisions, as well as groups of decisions and decision rules. There can be dynamic (or context-dependent) preferences, inconsistent preferences, and meta-preferences. Following [Brewka, 1989; Junker, 1997], preferences constrain the order in which decisions are made during search. It is possible to enumerate all configurations or to focus search to preferred configurations, which respect the default choices and preferences of the user.