Qualitative possibility theory and its applications to constraint satisfaction and decision under uncertainty

This paper provides a brief survey and an introduction to the modeling capabilities of qualitative possibility theory in decision analysis for the representation and the aggregation of preferences, for the treatment of uncertainty and for the handling of situations similar to previously encountered ones. "Qualitative" here means that we restrict ourselves to linearly ordered valuation sets (only the ordering of the grades is meaningful) for the assessment of preferences, uncertainty and similarity. Moreover, all the evaluations refer to the same valuation set (commensurability assumption). Such a qualitative structure is poor but not very demanding from an elicitation point of view; however, it is sufficient for giving birth to a valuable set of modeling tools. (C) 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.