A Syntactical Approach to Qualitative Constraint Networks Merging

We address the problem of merging qualitative constraint networks (QCNs) representing agents local preferences or beliefs on the relative position of spatial or temporal entities. Two classes of merging operators which, given a set of input QCNs defined on the same qualitative formalism, return a set of qualitative configurations representing a global view of these QCNs, are pointed out. These operators are based on local distances and aggregation functions. In contrast to QCN merging operators recently proposed in the literature, they take account for each constraint from the input QCNs within the merging process. Doing so, inconsistent QCNs do not need to be discarded at start, hence agents reporting locally consistent, yet globally inconsistent pieces of information (due to limited rationality) can be taken into consideration.

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