Minimal belief and negation as failure in multi-agent systems

We propose an epistemic, nonmonotonic approach to the formalization of knowledge in a multi-agent setting. From the technical viewpoint, a family of nonmonotonic logics, based on Lifschitz's modal logic of minimal belief and negation as failure, is proposed, which allows for formalizing an agent which is able to reason about both its own knowledge and other agents' knowledge and ignorance. We define a reasoning method for such a logic and characterize the computational complexity of the major reasoning tasks in this formalism. From the practical perspective, we argue that our logical framework is well-suited for representing situations in which an agent cooperates in a team, and each agent is able to communicate his knowledge to other agents in the team. In such a case, in many situations the agent needs nonmonotonic abilities, in order to reason about such a situation based on his own knowledge and the other agents' knowledge and ignorance. Finally, we show the effectiveness of our framework in the robotic soccer application domain.