Planning with partial preference models

Abstract

In many real-world planning scenarios, the users are interested in optimizing multiple objectives (such as makespan and execution cost), but are unable to express their exact tradeoff between those objectives. When a planner encounters such partial preference models, rather than look for a single optimal plan, it needs to present the pareto set of plans and let the user choose from them. This idea of presenting the full pareto set is fraught with both computational and user-interface challenges. To make it practical, we propose the approach of finding a representative subset of the pareto set. We measure the quality of this representative set using the Integrated Convex Preference (ICP) model, originally developed in the OR community. We implement several heuristic approaches based on the Metric-LPG planner to find a good solution set according to this measure. We present empirical results demonstrating the promise of our approach.