Epistemic profiles and belief structures

Abstract

The paper is devoted to a novel formalization of beliefs in multiagent systems. Our aim is to bridge the gap between idealized logical approaches to modeling beliefs and their actual implementations. Therefore the stages of belief acquisition, intermediate reasoning and final belief formation are isolated and analyzed. We give a novel semantics reflecting those stages and suitable for building complex belief structures in the context of incomplete and/or inconsistent information. Namely, an agent starts with constituents, i.e., sets of initial beliefs acquired by perception, expert supplied knowledge, communication with other agents and perhaps other ways. Next, the constituents are transformed into consequents according to agents' epistemic profiles. Additionally, a uniform treatment of single agent and group beliefs is achieved. Importantly, we indicate an implementation framework ensuring tractability of reasoning about beliefs. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.