In artificial intelligence, preference-based planning is a form of automated planning and scheduling which focuses on producing plans that additionally satisfy as many user-specified preferences as possible. In many problem domains, a task can be accomplished by various sequences of actions (also known as plans). These plans can vary in quality: there can be many ways to solve a problem, but preferred generally are ways more, e.g., cost-effective, quick, and safe.
Preference-based planners take these preferences into account when producing a plan for a given problem. Examples of preference-based planning software include PPLAN[1] and HTNPlan-P[2] (preference-based hierarchical task network (HTN) planning).