When Agents Communicate Hypotheses in Critical Situations

This paper discusses the problem of efficient propagation of uncertain information in dynamic environments and critical situations. When a number of (distributed) agents have only partial access to information, the explanation(s) and conclusion(s) they can draw from their observations are inevitably uncertain. In this context, the efficient propagation of information is concerned with two interrelated aspects: spreading the information as quickly as possible, and refining the hypotheses at the same time. We describe a formal framework designed to investigate this class of problem, and we report on preliminary results and experiments using the described theory.