Abstract
When agents operate in a society with incomplete information and with diverse and conflicting influences, they may, in certain instances, lack the knowledge, the motivation and/or the capacity to enact all their commitments. However, to function as a coherent society it is important for these agents to have a means to resolve such conflicts and to come to a mutual understanding about their actions. To this end, argumentation-based negotiation provides agents with an effective means to resolve conflicts within a multi-agent society. However, to engage in such argumentative encounters, agents require four fundamental capabilities; a schema to reason in a social context, a mechanism to identify a suitable set of arguments, a language and a protocol to exchange these arguments, and a decision making functionality to generate such dialogues. This paper presents formulations of all of these capabilities and proposes a coherent framework that allows agents to argue, negotiate, and, thereby, resolve conflicts within a multi-agent society.
The first author is a full time PhD student funded by EPSRC under the project Information Exchange (GR/S03706/01). The authors also extend their gratitude to Pietro Panzarasa, Chris Reed, and Xudong Luo for their thoughts, contributions, and discussions.
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Karunatillake, N.C., Jennings, N.R., Rahwan, I., Norman, T.J. (2005). Arguing and Negotiating in the Presence of Social Influences. In: Pěchouček, M., Petta, P., Varga, L.Z. (eds) Multi-Agent Systems and Applications IV. CEEMAS 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 3690. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11559221_23
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11559221_23
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