• Advisor :
• Sébastien Konieczny

• Co-Supervisor :
• Patricia Everaere (CRIStAL)

• Funding : ANR

Belief Merging operators aim at defining a coherent belie base that best represents an input profile of belief bases that, most of the time, provide some mutually inconsistent pieces of information.

Usual belief merging operators assume that all the bases from the profile have the same importante/reliability/priority. But there are a lot of applications where it is not the case. So it is important to define operators that allow to take into account in a rational way these differences of importante/reliability/priority.

The aim of this PhD thesis is to study prioritized merging operators, that is to say operators that allow to define a belief base that best represents the profile of belief bases provided as input, and that take into account in a principled way the differences of priority between these bases.

It is easy to figure out the definition of some concrete merging operators, in particular for majority merging ones, but for other classes of operators, such as arbitration operators, it is far less obvious.

The aim of this PhD will be, after a bibliographic study of belief merging and related topics, such as voting theory, to define and study these prioritized operators, and in particular to find a logical characterization of these operators in terms of rationality postulates and of a representation theorem.