A classification and survey of preference handling approaches in nonmonotonic reasoning

In recent years, there has been a large amount of disparate work concerning the repre-sentation and reasoning with qualitative preferential information by means of 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 ex-pected to satisfy. A comprehensive set of approaches is subsequently given and classified with respect to these sets of underlying principles.