Hierarchical Decision Making by Autonomous Agents

Abstract. Often, decision making involves autonomous agents that are structured in a complex hierarchy, representing e.g. authority. Typically the agents share the same body of knowledge, but each may have its own, possibly conflicting, preferences on the available information. We model the common knowledge base for such preference agents as a logic program under the extended answer set semantics, thus allowing for the defeat of rules to resolve conflicts. An agent can express its preferences on certain aspects of this information using a partial order relation on either literals or rules. Placing such agents in a hierarchy according to their position in the decision making process results in a system where agents cooperate to find solutions that are jointly preferred. We show that a hierarchy of agents with either preferences on rules or on literals can be transformed into an equivalent system with just one type of preferences. Regarding the expressiveness, the formalism essentiall...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: JELIA
• Authors: Stijn Heymans, Davy Van Nieuwenborgh, Dirk Vermeir
• Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, Autonomous Agents, Decision Making, JELIA 2004, Preferences