Goal-Based Qualitative Preference Systems

Goals are not only used to identify desired states or outcomes, but may also be used to derive qualitative preferences between outcomes. We show that Qualitative Preference Systems (QPSs) provide a general, flexible and succinct way to represent preferences based on goals. If the domain is not Boolean, preferences are often based on orderings on the possible values of variables. We show that QPSs that are based on such multi-valued criteria can be translated into equivalent goal-based QPSs that are just as succinct. Finally, we show that goalbased QPSs allow for more fine-grained updates than their multi-valued counterparts. These results show that goals are very expressive as a representation of qualitative preferences and moreover, that there are certain advantages of using goals instead of multi-valued criteria.