A decision engine based on rational aggregation of heuristic knowledge

Constraint propagation is a matter of logical deduction, but this is not usually sufficient to reach a solution to a problem. Heuristic knowledge is usually needed to go on with the solution search when logical deduction becomes inefficient. The way this second type of knowledge is handled has more to do with decision rather than deduction. In this paper we suggest a mechanism to handle heuristic knowledge based on social choice theory. An analogy is proposed between the cooperation problem among heuristics expressed as decision rules and the voting problem. This analogy allows to define and justify aggregation modes for results provided by each decision rule, with a view to providing a global decision ranking. An application to job-shop scheduling has been carried out.