Abstracting soft constraints: framework, properties, examples

Soft constraints are very and expressive. However, they also are very complex to handle. For this reason, it may be reasonable in several cases to pass to an abstract version of a given soft constraint problem, and then to bring some useful information from the abstract problem to the concrete one. This will hopefully make the search for a solution, or for an optimal solution, of the concrete problem, faster. In this paper we propose an abstraction scheme for soft constraint problems and we study its main properties. We show that processing the abstracted version of a soft constraint problem can help us in finding good approximations of the optimal solutions, or also in obtaining information that can make the subsequent search for the best solution easier. We also show how the abstraction scheme can be used to devise new hybrid algorithms for solving soft constraint problems, and also to import constraint propagation algorithms from the abstract scenario to the concrete one. This may be useful when we don\u27t have any (or any efficient) propagation algorithm in the concrete setting

An Abstraction Framework for Soft Constraints, And Its Relationship with Constraint Propagation

. Soft constraints are very flexible and expressive. However, they also are very complex to handle. For this reason, it may reasonable in several cases to pass to an abstract version of a given soft problem, and then to bring some useful information from the abstract problem to the concrete one. This will hopefully make the search for a solution, or for an optimal solution, of the concrete problem, faster. In this paper we review the main concepts and properties of our abstraction framework for soft constraints, and we show how it can be used to import constraint propagation algorithms from the abstract scenario to the concrete one. This may be useful when we don't have any (or any e#cient) propagation algorithm in the concrete setting.