Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.3/226366

Title

Axiomatic characterization of belief merging by negotiation

Author(s)

Tran, Trong Hieu;  Nguyen, Ngoc Thanh;  Vo, Quoc Bao

Abstract

Belief merging has been an active research field with many important applications. The major approaches for the belief merging problems, considered as arbitration processes, are based on the construction of the total pre-orders of alternatives using distance functions and aggregation functions. However, these approaches require that all belief bases are provided explicitly and the role of agents, who provide the belief bases, are not adequately considered. Therefore, the results are merely ideal and difficult to apply in the multi-agent systems. In this paper, we approach the merging problems from other point of view. Namely, we treat a belief merging problem as a game, in which rational agents participate in a negotiation process to find out a jointly consistent consensus trying to preserve as many important original beliefs as possible. To this end, a model of negotiation for belief merging is presented, a set of rational and intuitive postulates to characterize the belief merging operators are proposed, and a representation theorem is presented.

Publication type

Journal article

Research centre

Swinburne University of Technology

Source

Multimedia Tools and Applications, Vol. 65, no. 1 (Jul 2013), pp. 133-159

Publication year

2013

FOR Code(s)

0801 Artificial Intelligence and Image Processing;  0803 Computer Software;  0806 Information Systems

Keyword(s)

Belief merging;  Belief negotiation

Publisher

Springer

ISSN

1380-7501

Publisher URL

http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11042-012-1136-7

Copyright

Copyright © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2012.

Additional information

The authors acknowledge support from the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education under grant no. N N519 407437 (2009-2012).

Peer reviewed