Multiagent reason maintenance and group adaptability

This paper describes research on an algorithm for improving the efficiency of the algorithm of Huhns and Bridgeland (1991) for justification-based, distributed reason maintenance (DRM). Improvements are made by ordering the relabel attempts by relative group adaptability, a measure of the relative difficulty of achieving a consistent relabeling of shared beliefs among a group of agents. Estimates of group adaptability can be made by retaining a history of relabeling efforts, using these along with a problem-solving principle of recency, similar to the virtual-memory principle of locality. An implementation has been accomplished and an example of this technique is presented