Pierre Savéant

Integration and propagation of a multi-criteria decision making model in constraint programming

In this paper we propose a general integration scheme for a Multi-Criteria Decision Making model of the Multi-Attribute Utility Theory in Constraint Programming. We introduce the Choquet integral as a general aggregation function for multi-criteria optimization problems and define the Choquet global constraint that propagates this function during the Branch-and-Bound search. Finally the benefits of the propagation of the Choquet constraint are evaluated on the examination timetabling problem.

MCS—A new algorithm for multicriteria optimisation in constraint programming

In this paper we propose a new algorithm called MCS for the search for solutions to multicriteria combinatorial optimisation problems. To quickly produce a solution that offers a good trade-off between criteria, the MCS algorithm alternates several Branch & Bound searches following diversified search strategies. It is implemented in CP in a dedicated framework and can be specialised for either complete or partial search.

Evidential Markov decision processes

This paper proposes a new model, the EMDP (Evidential Markov Decision Process). It is a MDP (Markov Decision Process) for belief functions in which rewards are defined for each state transition, like in a classical MDP, whereas the transitions are modeled as in an EMC (Evidential Markov Chain), i.e. they are sets transitions instead of states transitions. The EMDP can fit to more applications than a MDPST (MDP with Set-valued Transitions). Generalizing to belief functions allows us to cope with applications with high uncertainty (imprecise or lacking data) where probabilistic approaches fail. Implementation results are shown on a search-and-rescue unmanned rotorcraft benchmark.