Dealing with incomplete preferences in soft constraint problems

Abstract. We consider soft constraint problems where some of the preferences may be unspecified. This models, for example, situations with several agents pro-viding the data, or with possible privacy issues. In this context, we study how to find an optimal solution without having to wait for all the preferences. In particu-lar, we define an algorithm to find a solution which is necessarily optimal, that is, optimal no matter what the missing data will be, with the aim to ask the user to reveal as few preferences as possible. Experimental results show that in many cases a necessarily optimal solution can be found without eliciting too many preferences.