Belief Systems for Conflict Resolution

In a multiagent system, conflicts may arise because of two basic reasons: 1) different agents have contrasting goals; 2) different agents have inconsistent knowledge. This situation can originate when agents are autonomous and strongly motivated by their own interests, and when heterogeneous agents, with different skills, ‘histories’ and beliefs, coexist in a dynamic environment. This paper is focused on the representation of two agents’ epistemic conflicts, originated by the presence of contrasting beliefs. In such a situation, for an agent ‘S’ to agree on a cooperative plan with another agent ‘H’ it is necessary to communicate and solve the conflicts which could prevent the realisation of the specific plan identified. In order to do this, S must be able to reason about H’s beliefs and goals. This requires S to maintain an adequate representation of H’s mental states and to use this model to develop a plan for communication which will persuade H to adopt the cooperative goal. In this paper we introduce and formalise a discoursegeneration oriented model of beliefs which uses the concept of ‘event’ as fundamental unit for the knowledge representation. The basic features of the model defined include a qualitative degreesof-belief approach to represent uncertain beliefs, two-level nested mutual beliefs expressions and beliefs grounding through rationality and experience.