Year: 2007
Type: dissertation
Abstract: In this thesis, a particular class of agent is singled out for examination. In order to provide \na guiding metaphor, we speak of control room agents. Our focus is on rational decision- \nmaking by such agents, where the circumstances obtaining are such that rationality is \nbounded. Control room agents, whether human or non-human, need to reason and act \nin a changing environment with only limited information available to them. Determining \nthe current state of the environment is a central concern for control room agents if they \nare to reason and act sensibly. A control room agent cannot plan its actions without \nhaving an internal representation (epistemic state) of its environment, and cannot make \nrational decisions unless this representation, to some level of accuracy, reflects the state \nof its environment. The focus of this thesis is on three aspects regarding the epistemic \nfunctioning of a control room agent: \n1. How should the epistemic state of a control room agent be represented in order to \nfacilitate logical analysis? \n2. How should a control room agent change its epistemic state upon receiving new \ninformation? \n3. How should a control room agent combine available information from different \nsources? \nIn describing the class of control room agents as first-order intentional systems hav- \ning both informational and motivational attitudes, an agent-oriented view is adopted. \nThe central construct used in the information-theoretic approach, which is qualitative in \nnature, is the concept of a templated ordering. \nRepresenting the epistemic state of a control room agent by a (special form of) tem- \nplated ordering signals a departure from the many approaches in which only the beliefs \nof an agent are represented. Templated orderings allow for the representation of both \nknowledge and belief. \nA control room agent changes its epistemic state according to a proposed epistemic \nchange algorithm, which allows the agent to select between two well-established forms of \nbelief change operations, namely, belief revision and belief update. \nThe combination of (possibly conflicting) information from different sources has re- \nceived a lot of attention in recent years. Using templated orderings for the semantic \nrepresentation of information, a new family of purely qualitative merging operations is \ndeveloped.
Institution: University of South Africa
Language: English
Subfield: Artificial Intelligence
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2141543816