Author(s): Malheiro, Benedita ; Jennings, Nicholas ; Oliveira, Eugénio
Date: 1994
Persistent ID: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.22/5126
Origin: Repositório Científico do Instituto Politécnico do Porto
Subject(s): Multiagent Systems/Sistemas Multiagente; Distributed Coherence Maintenance
The ability to respond sensibly to changing and conflicting beliefs is an integral part of intelligent agency. To this end, we outline the design and implementation of a Distributed Assumption-based Truth Maintenance System (DATMS) appropriate for controlling cooperative problem solving in a dynamic real world multi-agent community. Our DATMS works on the principle of local coherence which means that different agents can have different perspectives on the same fact provided that these stances are appropriately justified. The belief revision algorithm is presented, the meta-level code needed to ensure that all system-wide queries can be uniquely answered is described, and the DATMS’ implementation in a general purpose multi-agent shell is discussed.
