Reasoning about ceteris paribus preference with constraint hierarchy framework

CP-networks provides a convenient means for expressing preferences in reasoning, but it is not good at handling preferences with hard constraints. The paper proposes a new approach, which transforms the CP-network with hard constraints into one constraint hierarchy, therefore one could process preferences and constraints in a single formalism with fruitful constraint solving algorithms. Furthermore, illustrates it with some examples, proves that the transformation preserves the ceteris paribus property and presents some complexity results. Finally compares it with related work and concludes the paper.