Incorporating Belief Merging into Relevance-Sensitive Belief Structures

Belief structures have been introduced by Chopra and Parikh as a well-behaved and relevance-sensitive model that is perfectly suitable for representing the beliefs of resource-bounded agents. In this paper, we point out that belief structures are compatible with all the rationality-postulates for belief revision, proposed by Alchourrón, Gärdenfors and Makinson, combined with a popular relevance-sensitive principle, proposed independently by Parikh. This conclusion was unknown, since Chopra and Parikh considered in their original work only a portion of the rationality-postulates for belief revision. Furthermore, we incorporate the well-studied process of belief merging into the belief-structures model, and show how this approach rationally eliminates undesired inconsistencies arising when reasoning with or revising belief structures, and leads to an increased coherence of such structures.