Confluence Operators (JELIA'08)

In the logic based framework of knowledge representation and reasoning many operators have been defined in order to capture different kinds of change: revision, update, merging and many others. There are close links between revision, update, and merging. Merging operators can be considered as extensions of revision operators to multiple belief bases. And update operators can be considered as pointwise revision, looking at each model of the base, instead of taking the base as a whole. Thus, a natural question is the following one: Are there natural operators that are pointwise merging, just as update are pointwise revision? The goal of this work is to give a positive answer to this question. In order to do that, we introduce a new class of operators: the confluence operators. These new operators can be useful in modelling negotiation processes.