Abstract. The Semiring Constraint Satisfaction Problem (SCSP) framework is a popular approach for the representation of partial constraint satisfaction problems. In this framework preferences can be associated with tuples of values of the variable domains. Bistarelli et al. [1] define act solution to a SCSP which consists of the best set of solution tuples for the variables in the problem. Sometimes this abstract solution may not be good enough, and in this case we want to change the constraints so that we solve a problem that is slightly different from the original problem but has an acceptable solution. We propose a relaxation of a SCSP, and use a semiring to give a distance measure between the original SCSP and the relaxed SCSP.