Revising Nonmonotonic Theories: The Case of Defeasible Logic

The revision and transformation of knowledge is widely recognized as a key issue in knowledge representation and reasoning. Reasons for the importance of this topic are the fact that intelligent systems are gradually developed and refined, and that often the environment of an intelligent system is not static but changes over time. Traditionally belief revision has been concerned with revising first order theories. Nonmonotonic reasoning provides rigorous techniques for reasoning with incomplete information. Until recently the dynamics of nonmonotonic reasoning approaches has attracted little attention. This paper studies the dynamics of defeasible logic, a simple and efficient form of nonmonotonic reasoning based on defeasible rules and priorities. We define revision and contraction operators and propose postulates. Our postulates try to follow the ideas of AGM belief revision as far as possible, but some AGM postulates clearly contradict the nonmonotonic nature of defeasible logic, as we explain. Finally we verify that the operators satisfy the postulates.