Solving Conflicting Beliefs with a Distributed Belief Revision Approach

The ability to solve conflicting beliefs is crucial for multiagent systems where the information is dynamic, incomplete, and distributed over a group of individuals. The individual agents have partial views and, frequently, hold disparate beliefs regarding shared information. The nature of these conflicts is dynamic and requires adequate methodologies for dynamic conflict resolution. The proposed conflict resolution methodologies are based on an intrinsically dynamic approach distributed belief revision. The distributed belief revision approach adopted is based on the availability of distributed reason maintenance capabilities (to detect and remove the conflicting sets of beliefs from the agents’ knowledge bases) and on the ability to select preferred outcomes (in order to solve the detected conflicts). Two types of conflicting beliefs are addressed in this paper: Belief/Disbelief conflicts and Disbelief conflicts. The Belief/Disbelief type of conflict results from the assignment, by different agents, of opposite belief status to the same concept/proposition. The Disbelief type of conflict is generated by the reason maintenance mechanism and occurs when previously held conclusions are dropped. The methodology for solving Belief/Disbelief conflicts is, basically, a selection process based on the assessment of the credibility of the opposing belief status. The methodology for solving Disbelief conflicts is, essentially, a search process for a consensual alternative based on a "next best" relaxation strategy. These methodologies we are proposing are organized in a multi-procedure sequence ordered by the amount of knowledge used for solving the conflict. The different procedures within each methodology are sequentially applied until an acceptable conflict outcome is