Abstract

This paper studies a variant of axioms originally developed by Shafer and Shenoy (1988). It is investigated which extra assumptions are needed to perform the local computations in a HUGIN-like architecture (Jensen et al. 1990) or in the architecture of Lauritzen and Spiegelhalter (1988). In particular it is shown that propagation of belief functions can be performed in these architectures. Keywords: articial intelligence, belief function, constraint propagation, expert system, probability propagation, valuation-based system. 1 Introduction An important development in articial intelligence is associated with an abstract theory of local computation known as the Shafer{Shenoy axioms (Shafer and Shenoy 1988; Shenoy and Shafer 1990). These describe in a very general setting how computations can be performed eciently and locally in a variety of problems, just if a few simple conditions are satised. Even though the axioms were developed to formalize computation with belief functions (Shaf...

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