Preferences are ubiquitous in real life: most problems are over-constrained and would not be solvable if we insist that all their requirements are strictly met. Moreover, many problems are more naturally described via preference rather than hard statements. Soft constraints are the way the constraint community has extended its classical framework to deal with the concept of preferences. However, other frameworks for expressing preferences have been proposed in the last few years in AI or related disciplines, with different features and leading to different results. For example, both qualitative and quantitative preference frameworks are being studied and used to model and solve real-life problems.
The interest of the community on preferences and soft constraints has increased in the last years. Examples are, from the modeling side, an active research on CP nets and some preference-based logic, and from the algorithmic side, several studies dealing with specific semantics of soft constraints such as propositional logic formulae (i.e. MAX-SAT) or global soft constraints in Constraint Programming or probability distributions (i.e.
probabilistic reasoning) or uncertainty.
The purpose of this workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners who are interested in all aspects of preferences and soft constraints, such as:
* theoretical frameworks
* problem modeling
* solving algorithms
* decomposition methods and associated graph algorithms
* tractability
* languages
* preference aggregation
* preference elicitation
* multi-objective or qualitative optimization
* combining/integrating different frameworks and algorithms
* comparative studies
* real-life applications
This year, the workshop is more specifically oriented towards graph decomposition approaches and tractability. Papers presenting new decomposition approaches, original criteria for selecting a decomposition, algorithms for generating interesting decompositions, comparison with existing approaches, theoretical and practical issues on the exploitation of such decompositions, new tractable classes... are especially welcome.