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Preferring Abductive Models and Inspecting Side-Effects for Decision Making

This work proposes the application of preferences over abductive logic programs as an appealing declarative formalism to model choice situations. In particular, both a priori and a posteriori handling of preferences between abductive extensions of a theory are addressed as complementary and essential mechanisms in a broader framework for abductive reasoning. The preference-based decision making process may depend, not only on the available abducibles chosen, but also (and foremost) on specific side-effects of adopting such abducibles. We present the concept of Inspection Point in Abductive Logic Programs, and show how, by means of examples, one can employ it to investigate sideeffects of interest (the inspection points) in order to help evaluate and prefer among abductive solutions. We show how this type of reasoning requires a new mechanism, not provided by others already available. We furthermore show how to implement this new mechanism on top of the XSB-XASP platform in a way that can be adopted by other systems too. Furthermore, all of these preference mechanisms are combined with other formalisms for decision making, like economic decision theory, resulting in theories containing the best advantages from both qualitative and quantitative formalisms. Several examples are presented throughout to illustrate the enounced methodologies. These have been tested in our implementation, which we explain in detail.