A novel approach to default reasoning for MAS

Abstract

In a multi-agent system the sought information can often be found across various knowledge bases, which means that making early assumptions can lead to hasty conclusions. In the paper we present a formalism for distributed default reasoning to be performed by a group of agents that share knowledge in the form of a distributed default theory. The formalism is based on default transformations, which can be used to derive answers to queries in the form of defaults. Such new defaults can then be treated as intermediate results in the reasoning process. It is shown that passing messages containing transformed defaults is more informative than strict statements and enables avoiding early conclusions. Moreover, the extended reasoning features are embedded in the description logic framework. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.