Modeling and Generating Tradeoffs for Constraint-Based Configuration

During an interactive conguration session we may reach a point where our desires can not be met At this point we can consider "tradeoffs". Ideally, we would like the configurator to suggest appropriate tradeoffs to us. In this paper we have modeled tradeoffs in constraint-based configuration as additional constraints, and begun to study the issues involved in generating and evaluating such tradeoffs. We describe our basic approach in the context of a "toy" configuration problem based on the classic N-Queens problem. Initial experiments compare "proposal" strategies for generating tradeoffs. We lay out a program for further study, outlining the parameters of the problem space to be explored.