Merginator: A belief merging tool for consensus support

Abstract

Belief merging aims to combine pieces of information from different (and possibly conflicting) sources so as to produce a single consistent belief base which retains as much information as possible. In this paper, we describe Merginator, a logic-based tool implementing three belief merging operators presented with specific characteristics that make them interesting for comparison: Δ_Σ, Δ_GMax and Δ_ps. We describe these operators while solving a set of basic examples found in the literature that we translate into natural language to provide insights for Merginator users. We also propose two more complex consensus-seeking examples: an adaptation to the role play “Lost at Sea” and the subject of administrative response to air pollution in Hong Kong. Results show that all three operators provide a consensus to the scenarios, and Δ_ps gives the most refined consensus. This demonstrates that belief merging, is a viable technique to support consensus decision-making in many domains. Merginator is open source software available at GitHub.

Keywords

Consensus decision-making knowledge representation propositional logic logic-based merging belief merging operators

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