Reconciling inconsistent profiles of agents' knowledge states in distributed multiagent systems using consensus methods

In this paper, a partial model of a multiagent system is presented. This multiagent system is built of agents that use consensus methods to construct and update their knowledge of recognizable world states. Each agent in this system encapsulates a private database containing representations of empirically verified parts of knowledge of experienced world states (so-called encapsulated world profiles). In each agent and for each object of the world, this knowledge is computed by the agent as the consensus of encapsulated update resources. These update resources consist of the agent's perceptions of the object and similar perceptions communicated to the agent by other members of the same multiagent population. An example of encapsulated update resources is given and a list of related requirements for consensus computation is discussed.