A conservative approach to distributed belief fusion
Churn-Jung Lian · 2000
In this paper, we develop logics for merging beliefs of agents with different degrees of reliability. The logics are obtained by combining the multiagent epistemic logic and multi-sources reasoning systems. Every ordering for the reliability of the agents is represented by a modal operator, so we can reason with the merging information under different situations The approach is conservative in the sense that if an agent's belief is in conflict with those of higher priorities, then his belief is completely discarded front the merged result. We consider two strategies for the conservative merging of beliefs. In the first one, if inconsistency occurs at some level, then all beliefs at the lower levels are discarded simultaneously, so it is called level cutting strategy. For the second one, only the level at which the inconsistency occurs is skipped, so it is called level skipping strategy. The formal semantics and axiomatic systems for these two strategies are presented.