Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, 6, 115–143, 2003 © 2003 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Manufactured in The Netherlands. Distributed Belief Revision

Abstract. In this paper, a distributed approach to belief revision is presented. It is conceived as a collective activity of a group of interacting agents, in which each component contributes with its own local beliefs. The integration of the different opinions is performed not by an external supervisor, but by the entire group through an election mechanism. Each agent exchanges information with the other components and uses a local belief revision mechanism to maintain its cognitive state consistent. We propose a model for local belief revision/integration based on what we called: “Principle of Recover-ability. ” Computationally, our way to belief revision consists of three steps acting on the symbolic part of the information, so as to deal with consistency and derivation, and two other steps working with the numerical weight of the information, so as to deal with uncertainty. In order to evaluate and compare the characteristics and performance of the centralized and of the distributed approaches, we made five different experiments simulating a simple society in which each agent is characterized by a degree of competence, communicates with some others, and revise its cognitive state. The results of these experi-ments are presented in the paper