Distributed Belief Revision versus Distributed Truth Maintenance

This paper outlines a distinction between distributed truth maintenance and distributed belief revision. The latter has a more complex conceptualization than the former and it needs the evaluation of special features as the relationship between the informant's reliability and the information's credibility. We point out some criteria to judge the qualities of a distributed belief revision strategy from a global perspective. However, the performances of such a strategy can be estimated only on a simulation basis. The general framework for assumption-based distributed belief revision that we present has been tested on our specific “CLUEDO” multi-agent simulation testbed. The model has been continuously improved during many cycles of modification of the model, simulation, and evaluation of the performances, till the results presented in this paper are achieved