Belief Merging without Distance Measures.
Maria del Pilar Pozos Parra, Verónica Borja Macías · 2008
When information comes from different sources inconsistent beliefs may appear. To handle inconsistency, several model-based belief merging operators have been proposed. Starting from the beliefs of a group of agents which might conflict, these operators return a unique consistent belief base which represents the beliefs of the group. The operators, parameterized by a distance between interpretations and aggregation function, usually only take into account consistent bases. Consequently some information which is not responsible for conflicts may be ignored. This paper presents PS-Merge, an alternative way of merging which is based on the notion of Partial Satisfiability. The proposal uses an alternative way of measuring the satisfaction of a formula since Partial Satisfiability lets us have satisfaction values in the interval [0,1]. PS-Merge produces similar results to other merging approaches. Actually, in order to achieve satisfactory results for different scenarios from the literature we require different merging operators while the proposal obtains similar results for all these different scenarios with a unique operator, PS-Merge.