Distributed Knowledge Elicitation through the Dempster-Shafer theory of Evidence: a simulation study
Aldo Franco Dragoni, Paolo Giorgini, Alessandro Bolognini · Università Politecnica delle Marche (Università Politecnica delle Marche) · 1996
This paper reports the results of an experiment carried on MASSIM, a specific multi-agent simulation testbed. There are two files, one containing true propositions and the other containing their correspective negations. Five agents in turn access one of these files. Each agent has a "capacity" that will be used as the frequency with which the agent accesses the file with the correct knowledge. Agents randomly exchange information with the others. Since they have limited degrees of capacity, their knowledge bases quickly become inconsistent. Each agent is equipped with the same belief revision mechanism to detect and solve these contradictions. This embodies the Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence to evaluate the credibility of the various pieces of information and estimate the reliability of the other agents. In this way, the agents learn from the others and about the others' trustworthiness and capability. We call this global process "Distributed Knowledge Elicitation". The purpose of...