Towards a Classification of Preference Handling Approaches in Nonmonotonic Reasoning

Contents

In recent years there has been large amount of disparate work concerning the representation and reasoning with preferential information in approaches to nonmonotonic reasoning. Given the variety of underlying systems, assumptions, motivations, and intuitions, it is difficult to compare or relate one approach with another. Here we present an overview and classification for approaches to dealing with preference. A set of criteria for classifying approaches is given, followed by a set of desiderata that an approach might be expected to satisfy. A comprehensive set of approaches is subsequently given and classified with respect to these sets of underlying principles.