A New Framework for Knowledge Revision of Abductive Agents Through Their Interaction

In this paper we discuss the design of a knowledge revision framework for abductive reasoning agents, based on interaction. This involves issues such as: how to exploit knowledge multiplicity to find solutions to problems that agents may not individually solve, what information must be passed or requested, how agents can take advantage of the answers that they obtain, and how they can revise their reasoning process as a consequence of interacting with each other. We describe a novel negotiation framework in which agents will be able to exchange not only abductive hypotheses but also meta-knowledge, which, in particular in this paper, is understood as agents’ integrity constraints. We formalise some aspects of such a framework, by introducing an algebra of integrity constraints, aimed at formally supporting the updating/revising process of the agent knowledge.