Hierarchical Conflict Management

Two distinct concerns seem apparent in conflict management strategies, one reflecting real-time decision-making and the other constrained deliberation. This paper attempts to provide more detail concerning our experiments in this area and provide a more unified model of conflict resolution as the management of resources in constrained environments. This paper is structured in the following manner. First, we describe the scope of the problems which interest us. We then describe our approaches to address these problems. Finally, we describe the implementation of our research and our goal of developing mechanisms applicable to resolving conflicting constraints in a hierarchy of decision makers. Introduction We have been examining conflict resolution (1) in real-time forwardchaining systems at the rule level and (2) conflict management with respect to the hypotheses proposed by interacting agents. While these two areas initially seem disparate, they both consider choosing between multiple alternatives based upon constraints. Further, the more information added to either system, the better the methods should be to perform. This paper considers, at a macro level, the questions: (1) what concepts are common to these two From: AAAI Technical Report WS-94-04. Compilation copyright © 1994, AAAI (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved.