Section: Scientific Foundations

Reasoning over Distributed Systems

In many application domains, the available data and knowledge is naturally spread among independent sources/agents. Some of them can collaborate with others, but none of them has a global view of either the total available knowledge or the topology of the network of interacting agents. We focused on an arising challenge in this context: propose distributed reasoning techniques, able to exploit all the global knowledge, despite the lack of a global view on this knowledge.

Our research has focused on consequence finding in distributed propositional-logic systems, distributed consistency-based diagnosis and distributed diagnosability analysis, consistency checking (SAT), and query answering in distributed description logic systems.