Logical Tools for Handling Change in Agent-Based Systems

Introduction and Motivation.- A Discussion of Concepts.- Introduction to Representation Problems.- Preferential Structures.- Higher Preferential Structures.- Hierarchical Conditionals.- Update.- Deontic Logic.- Theory Revision.- An Analysis of Defeasible Inheritance Systems.- Argumentation.- References.- Index.

From the reviews:

"I welcome this book and its attempt to bring systematic, reductive, and semantical order to a field that has had many different approaches, written by two well-established researchers in this area and other related areas of technical work on philosophically and epistemically motivated logics." Saul Kripke (The City University of New York)

"This book covers a broad range of ideas related to nonmonotonic reasoning. This review summarizes some of its nice ideas--or, as the authors say, its 'logical tools.' ... It would be fair to call this whole book an exposition on reactive diagrams in various application areas. ... there is substantial material for researchers. ... the book is primarily concerned with semantic structures." (K. Lodaya, ACM Computing Reviews, February, 2011)

"The book gives a very solid and comprehensive overview of various logics. It focuses on mapping of the logics to the formalism of reactive diagrams. ... The book is especially suited for logicians and researchers seeking to establish a rigorous theoretical foundation for their reasoning systems, or who are interested in comparing different reasoning systems on the basis of a common ground." (Jana Köhler, Zentralblatt MATH, Vol. 1215, 2011)