Towards a general-purpose belief maintenance system

This paper addresses the problem of probabilistic reasoning as it applies to Truth Maintenance Systems. A Belief Maintenance System hal! been constructed which manages a current set of probabilistic beliefs in much the same way that a TMS manages a set of true/false beliefs. Such a system may be thought of as a generalization of a. Truth Maintenance System. It enables one to reason using normal two or three-valued logic or using probabilistic values to represent partial belief. The design of the Belief Maintenance System is described and some problems are discussed which require further research. Finally, some examples are presented which show the utility of such a system.