In this thesis, a particular class of agent is singled out for examination. In order to provide
a guiding metaphor, we speak of control room agents. Our focus is on rational decision-
making by such agents, where the circumstances obtaining are such that rationality is
bounded. Control room agents, whether human or non-human, need to reason and act
in a changing environment with only limited information available to them. Determining
the current state of the environment is a central concern for control room agents if they
are to reason and act sensibly. A control room agent cannot plan its actions without
having an internal representation (epistemic state) of its environment, and cannot make
rational decisions unless this representation, to some level of accuracy, reflects the state
of its environment. The focus of this thesis is on three aspects regarding the epistemic
functioning of a control room agent:
1. How should the epistemic state of a control room agent be represented in order to
facilitate logical analysis?
2. How should a control room agent change its epistemic state upon receiving new
information?
3. How should a control room agent combine available information from different
sources?
In describing the class of control room agents as first-order intentional systems hav-
ing both informational and motivational attitudes, an agent-oriented view is adopted.
The central construct used in the information-theoretic approach, which is qualitative in
nature, is the concept of a templated ordering.
Representing the epistemic state of a control room agent by a (special form of) tem-
plated ordering signals a departure from the many approaches in which only the beliefs
of an agent are represented. Templated orderings allow for the representation of both
knowledge and belief.
A control room agent changes its epistemic state according to a proposed epistemic
change algorithm, which allows the agent to select between two well-established forms of
belief change operations, namely, belief revision and belief update.
The combination of (possibly conflicting) information from different sources has re-
ceived a lot of attention in recent years. Using templated orderings for the semantic
representation of information, a new family of purely qualitative merging operations is
developed. / School of Computing / Ph. D. (Computer Science)
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:unisa/oai:uir.unisa.ac.za:10500/2211 |
| Date | 28 February 2007 |
| Creators | Van der Westhuizen, Petra Laura |
| Contributors | Labuschagne, Willem, Van der Poll, John Andrew |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | 1 online resource (viii, 392 leaves) |
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