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Argumentation-based negotiation (ABN) provides agents with an effective means to resolve conflicts within a multi-agent society. However, to engage in such argumentative encounters the agents require the ability to generate arguments, which, in turn, demands 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 focuses on the first two issues and formulates models to capture them. Specifically, we propose a coherent schema, based on social commitments, to capture social influences emanating from the roles and relationships of a multi-agent society. After explaining how agents can use this schema to reason within a society, we then use it to identify two major ways of exploiting social influence within ABN to resolve conflicts. The first of these allows agents to argue about the validity of each other's social reasoning, whereas the second enables agents to exploit social influences by incorporating them as parameters within their negotiation. For each of these, we use our schema to systematically capture a comprehensive set of social arguments that can be used within a multi-agent society.

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, argumentationbased 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 future digital battlespace will be a fast-paced and frenetic environment that stresses information communication technology systems to the limit. The challenges are most acute in the tactical and operational domains where bandwidth is severely limited, security of information is paramount, the network is under physical and cyber attack and administrative support is minimal. Hyperion is a cluster of research projects designed to provide an automated and adaptive information management capability embedded in defence networks. The overall system architecture is designed to improve the situational awareness of field commanders by providing the ability to fuse and compose information services in real time. The key technologies adopted to enable this include: autonomous software agents, self-organizing middleware, a smart data filtering system and a 3-D battlespace simulation environment. This paper reviews some of the specific techniques under development within the Hyperion sub-projects and the results achieved to date.