A Model for Belief Revision in a Multi-Agent Environment

In modeling the knowledge processing structure of an Agent in a Multi-Agent world it becomes necessary to enlarge the traditional concept of Belief Revision. For detecting contradictions and identifying their sources it is sufficient to maintain informations about what has been told; but to "solve" a contradiction it is necessary to keep informations about who said it or, in general, about the source where that knowledge came from. We can take as certain the fact that an agent gave an information, but we can take the given information only as a revisable assumption. The Belief Revision system can't leave the sources of the informations out of consideration because of their relevance in giving the additional notion of "strength of belief" [Galliers 89]. In fact, the reliability of the source affects the credibility of the information and vice-versa. It is necessary to develop systems that deal with couples <assumption, source of the assumption>. In [Dragoni 91] we've proposed a system that moves in this direction. Here we give a short description of that system. In the first two parts we describe the agent's knowledge processing structure using a particular characterization of the "Assumption Based Belief Revision" concept; in part three we outline the project of an embedded device that enables the overall system to deal with couples <assumption, source of the assumption> in an rather anthropomorphic manner.