Human-centred feasibility restoration in practice

Abstract

AbstractDecision systems for solving real-world combinatorial problems must be able to report infeasibility in such a way that users can understand the reasons behind it, and determine how to modify the problem to restore feasibility. Current methods mainly focus on reporting one or more subsets of the problem constraints that cause infeasibility. Methods that also show users how to restore feasibility tend to be less flexible and/or problem-dependent. We describe a problem-independent approach to feasibility restoration that combines existing techniques from the literature in novel ways to yield meaningful, useful, practical, and flexible user support. We evaluated the resulting framework on three real-world applications and conducted a qualitative expert user study with participants from different application domains.