Distributed decision support systems under limited degrees of competence: A simulation study

We report the results of a simulation experiment inspired by a popular board game. Nine agents are wandering, searching for clues to fill the three slots of a detective case. They have a limited perceptive capacity so that they can discern a clue badly. On meeting each others, agents exchange their current results. They can be insincere, i.e., they can provide false information to divert the others' investigations. Each agent is equipped with a same belief revision mechanism that makes them able to recognize and solve contradictions, assign a degree of credibility to each piece of information and assign a degree of reliability to each agent (itself included). The purpose of the experiment is that of evaluating the performances of the entire agency on the varying of the local strategies for belief revision and communication. © 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.