Abstracting Soft Constraints: Some experimental results on Fuzzy CSPs

Soft constraints are very flexible and expressive. However, they may also be very complex to handle. For this reason, it may be convenient in several cases to pass to an abstract version of a given soft problem, and then bring some useful information from the abstract problem to the concrete one. This will hopefully make the search for a solution, or for an optimal solution, of the concrete problem, faster. In this paper we review the main concepts and properties of our abstraction framework for soft constraints, and we show some experimental results of its application to the solution of fuzzy constraints.