Summary
In some rescue or emergency situations, agents may act individually or on the basis of minimal coordination, while in others, full-fledged teamwork provides the only means for the rescue action to succeed. In such dynamic and often unpredictable situations agents’ awareness about their involvement becomes, on the one hand, crucial, but one can expect that it is only beliefs that can be obtained by means of communication and reasoning. A suitable level of communication should be naturally tuned to the circumstances. Thus in some situations individual belief may suffice, while in others everybody in a group should believe a fact or even the strongest notion of common belief is the relevant one.
Even though common knowledge cannot in general be established by communication, in this paper we present a procedure for establishing common beliefs in rescue situations by minimal communication. Because the low-level part of the procedure involves file transmission (e.g. by TCP or alternating-bit protocol), next to a general assumption on trust some additional assumptions on communication channels are needed. If in the considered situation communication is hampered to such an extent that establishing a common belief is not possible, creating a special kind of mutual intention (defined by us in other papers) within a rescue team may be of help.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Jennins, N.R., Sycara, K., Wooldridge, M.: A roadmap of agent research and development. Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems 1 (1998) 7–38
Levesque, H., Cohen, P., Nunes, J.: On acting together. In: Proceedings Eighth National Conference on AI, AAAI-Press and MIT Press (1990) 94–99
Bratman, M: Intention, Plans, and Practical Reason. Harvard University Press, Cambridge (MA) (1987)
Fagin, R., Halpern, J., Moses, Y., Vardi, M.: Reasoning about Knowledge. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA (1995)
Meyer, J.J.C., van der Hoek, W.: Epistemic Logic for AI and Theoretical Computer Science. Cambridge University Press (1995)
Dunin-Keplicz, B., Verbrugge, R.: Calibrating collective commitments. In: Proceedings of the 3rd International Central and Eastern European Conference on Multi-Agent Systems. Volume 2691 of LNAI., Springer Verlag (2003) 73–83
Dunin-Keplicz, B., Verbrugge, R.: A tuning machine for cooperative problem solving. Fundamenta Informaticae to appear (2004)
Steup, M.: The analysis of knowledge. In Zalta, E.N., ed.: The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (Spring 2001)
van der Hoek, W., Verbrugge, R.: Epistemic logic: A survey. In Petrosjan, L., Mazalov, V, eds.: Game Theory and Applications. Nova Science Publishers, vol. 8, New York (2002) 53–94
Parikh, R., Krasucki, P.: Levels of knowledge in distributed computing. Sadhana: Proceedings of the Indian Academy of Sciences 17 (1992) 167–191
Halpern, J.Y., Moses, Y: Knowledge and common knowledge in a distributed environment. In: Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing. (1984) 50–61
van Ditmarsch, H., Kooi, B.: Unsuccessful updates. In: Proceedings of the 12th International Congress of Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science (LMPS), Oviedo University Press (2003) 139–140
Halpern, J., Zuck, L.: A little knowledge goes a long way: Simple knowledge-based derivations and correctness proofs for a family of protocols. In: 6th ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing. (1987) 268–280
Stulp, F., Verbrugge, R.: A knowledge-based algorithm for the internet protocol TCP. Bulletin of Economic Research 54 (2002) 69–94
Castelfranchi, C, Tan, Y.H., eds.: Trust and Deception in Virtual Societies. Kluwer, Dordrecht (2001)
Dunin-Keplicz, B., Verbrugge, R.: Dialogue in teamwork. In: Proceedings of The 10th ISPE International Conference on Concurrent Engineering: Research and Applications, Rotterdam, A.A. Balkema Publishers (2003) 121–128
Dunin-Keplicz, B., Verbrugge, R.: Collective intentions. Fundamenta Informaticae 51(3)(2002)271–295
Dignum, F., Dunin-Keplicz, B., Verbrugge, R.: Creating collective intention through dialogue. Logic Journal of the IGPL 9 (2001) 145–158
Dunin-Keplicz, B., Verbrugge, R.: A reconfiguration algorithm for distributed problem solving. Engineering Simulation 18 (2001) 227–246
Dunin-Keplicz, B., Verbrugge, R.: Evolution of collective commitments during team-work. Fundamenta Informaticae 56 (2003) 329–371
Clark, H.H., Marshall, C: Definite reference and mutual knowledge. In Joshi, A., Webber, B., Sag, I., eds.: Elements of Discourse Understanding, Cambridge University Press (1981) 10–63
Paurobally, S., Cunningham, J., Jennings, N.R.: Ensuring consistency in the joint beliefs of interacting agents. In: Proceedings of the second international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems, ACM Press (2003) 662–669
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Dunin-Keplicz, B., Verbrugge, R. (2005). Creating Common Beliefs in Rescue Situations. In: Monitoring, Security, and Rescue Techniques in Multiagent Systems. Advances in Soft Computing, vol 28. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-32370-8_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-32370-8_5
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-23245-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-32370-9
eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)