Aggregating interval orders by propositional optimization

Abstract

Aggregating preferences for finding a consensus between several agents is an important issue in many fields, like economics, decision theory and artificial intelligence. In this paper we focus on the problem of aggregating interval orders which are special preference structures allowing the introduction of tresholds for the indifference relation. We propose to solve this problem by first translating it into a propositional optimization problem, namely the Binate Covering Problem, then to solve the latter using a max-sat solver. We discuss some properties of the proposed encoding and provide some hints about its practicability using preliminary experimental results. © 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.