Intelligent Techniques for Resolving Conflicts of Knowledge in Multi-Agent Decision Support Systems

The biggest challenge for agents’ collaboration in Decision Support Systems is resolving possible conflicts of knowledge. When coordinating activities, either in a cooperative or a competitive environment, conflicts may arise and three basic strategies to solve these conflicts are by means of negotiation, mediation and arbitration. Following these strategies; different intelligent techniques developed for knowledge conflict resolution. This paper focuses on some of the key intelligent techniques for conflict resolution in Multi-Agent Decision Support Systems. It focuses on the part of agents’ knowledge conflicts and it discusses seven techniques: Bayesian Network, Case Based Reasoning, Expert Systems, Fuzzy Systems, Genetic Algorithms, Ontological, and Searching based techniques. These techniques show how different technologies in the area of intelligent agents can be combined to solve this real-world decision support problem. Keywords— Bayesian Network, Case-Based Reasoning, Conflict Resolution, Decision Support Systems, Expert Systems, Fuzzy Systems, Genetic Algorithms, Multi-Agent Systems, Ontology, Searching.