The role of assumption identification in autonomous agent reasoning

Abstract

The concept of autonomy is central to the notion of agenthood and has been addressed by many researchers in the multi-agent systems community. We argue that the degree to which an agent's reasoning is autonomous is affected by the degree to which it is able to choose its assumptions autonomously. We discuss a technique that enables agents to identify appropriate assumptions dynamically, by employing representations of norms in Default Logic. Copyright © 2009, International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems.