Abstract
Conditional Preference Networks (CP-nets) are a compact and natural model to represent conditional qualitative preferences. In CP-nets, the set of variables is fixed in advance. That is, the set of alternatives available during the decision process are always the same no matter how long the process is. In many configuration and interactive problems, it is expected that some variables are subject to be included or excluded during the configuration process due to users showing interest or boredom on some aspects of the problem. Representing and reasoning with such changes is important to the success of the application and therefore, it is important to have a model capable of dynamically including or excluding variables. In this work, we introduce active CP-nets (aCP-nets) as an extension of CP-nets where variable participation is governed by a set of activation requirements. In particular, we introduce an activation status to the CP-net variables and analyze two possible semantics of aCP-nets along with their consistency requirements.