Finding Common Ground for Incoherent Horn Expressions

Abstract

Autonomous systems that operate in a shared environment with people need to be able to follow the rules of the society they occupy. While laws are unique for one society, different people and institutions may use different rules to guide their conduct. We study the problem of reaching a common ground among possibly incoherent rules of conduct. We formally define a notion of common ground and discuss the main properties of this notion. Then, we identify three sufficient conditions on the class of Horn expressions for which common grounds are guaranteed to exist. We provide a polynomial time algorithm that computes common grounds, under these conditions. We also show that if any of the three conditions is removed then common grounds for the resulting (larger) class may not exist.