Agents Deliberating over Action Proposals Using the ProCLAIM Model

Tolchinsky, Pancho; Atkinson, Katie; McBurney, Peter; Modgil, Sanjay; Cortés, Ulises

doi:10.1007/978-3-540-75254-7_4

Cited by 18 publications

(26 citation statements)

References 10 publications

(13 reference statements)

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“…These proposals are highly domain-specific (e.g. persuasion in negotiation (Sycara, 1990), sensor networks (Soh and Tsatsoulis, 2005) and classification (Ontañón and Plaza, 2007)) or centralise the argumentation functionality either in a mediator agent, which manages the dialogue between the agents of the system (Tolchinsky et al, 2007), or in a specific module of the system itself (Karacapilidis and Papadias, 2001). …”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards real-time agreements

Navarro

Heras

Botti

et al. 2013

Expert Systems with Applications

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In this paper, we deal with the problem of real-time coordination with the more general approach of reaching real-time agreements in MAS. Concretely, this work proposes a real-time argumentation framework in an attempt to provide agents with the ability of engaging in argumentative dialogues and come with a solution for their underlying agreement process within a bounded period of time. The framework has been implemented and evaluated in the domain of a customer support application. Concretely, we consider a society of agents that act on behalf of a group of technicians that must solve problems in a Technology Management Centre (TMC) within a bounded time. This centre controls every process implicated in the provision of technological and customer support services to private or public organisations by means of a call centre. The contract signed between the TCM and the customer establishes penalties if the specified time is exceeded.Keywords: Agreement Technologies, Real-Time, Multi-Agent Systems MotivationMany Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) operate in resource and time-constrained environments. In such domains, scarce resources must be shared between di↵erent agents taking into account that these agents must perform their tasks before a deadline is met. In addition, agents in open MAS are autonomous entities that can have their own knowledge resources, can play di↵erent roles and can have di↵erent objectives and preferences over values that they want to promote with their actions (e.g. an interested agent could want In this paper, we deal with the problem of real-time coordination with the more general approach of reaching real-time agreements in MAS. Therefore, our notion of a real-time agreement may refer to the fair allocation of a scarce resource, but also to the outcome of a negotiation process to make a deal in a sale operation, to the final label assigned in a classification problem, to the final state of the beliefs database of an agent in a beliefs revision problem, and many more. However, any of these processes must be temporal bounded. This is an important aspect to consider in any real-time argumentative process, where a community of agents are able to reach agreements through argumentation before a deadline is met. Any agreement reached after this deadline will be considered of a low quality, or even not valid if we are in a hard real-time environment. Therefore, it is necessary to control every step of the argumentative process in order to predict its duration in time (i.e. we must know the temporal cost of executing each step of the process). Taking into account this prediction, we can guarantee that the agents engaged in the argumentation dialogue will reach an agreement about the outcome of the agreement process (e.g. they will decide the final allocation for a resource, the label of an individual in a classification problem, etc.) before the specified deadline is met. The response provided by the agents does not need to be optimal, since in some cases the best response may require more proce...

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards real-time agreements

Navarro

Heras

Botti

et al. 2013

Expert Systems with Applications

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“…A practical application of multi-agent deliberation dialogues was developed by Tolchinsky et al [13] A model for discussion on proposals is coupled to a dialogue game. In the model, agents are proponents or opponents of some proposal for action, while a mediator agent determines the legal moves and evaluates moved arguments to see if they are appropriate and how they support or criticize the proposal for action.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Formal Argumentation Framework for Deliberation Dialogues

Kok

Meyer

Prakken

et al. 2011

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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Abstract. Agents engage in deliberation dialogues to collectively decide on a course of action. To solve conflicts of opinion that arise, they can question claims and supply arguments. Existing models fail to capture the interplay between the provided arguments as well as successively selecting a winner from the proposals. This paper introduces a general framework for agent deliberation dialogues that uses an explicit reply structure to produce coherent dialogues, guides in outcome selection and provide pointers for agent strategies.

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“…These two works assumed our first attempt to formalise an ASR [56] in which the argument schemes were formalised and constructed in a somewhat ad-hoc fashion, so hindering the application of ProCLAIM in new scenarios (such as in the environmental scenario presented in [52]). For this reason, in [51] we proposed a domain independent approach for the definition of the argument schemes and that we now (in §5) describe in much more detail and with some corrections and extensions. Furthermore, the prototype presented in [53] implements an interaction protocol for persuasion dialogues [41], which, as discussed in §1.2, is not always appropriate for collaborative decision making.…”

Section: The Transplant Scenariomentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Subsequent work focused on generalising ProCLAIM so as to be applicable to domains other than the medical. Key to this was the generalisation of [56]'s scenario-specific schemes and critical questions, sketched in [51], and used in the application of ProCLAIM to the environmental domain [52].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Deliberation dialogues for reasoning about safety critical actions

Tolchinsky

Modgil

Atkinson

et al. 2011

Auton Agent Multi-Agent Syst

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In this paper we present the argument-based model ProCLAIM, intended to provide a setting for heterogeneous agents to deliberate over safety critical actions. To achieve this purpose ProCLAIM features a Mediator Agent with three main tasks: 1) guiding the participating agents in what their valid dialectical moves are at each stage of the dialogue; 2) deciding whether submitted arguments should be accepted on the basis of their relevance; and finally, 3) evaluating the accepted arguments in order to provide an assessment of whether the proposed action should or should not be undertaken. The main focus in this paper is the proposal of a set of reasoning patters, represented in terms of argument schemes and critical questions, intended to automatise deliberations on whether a proposed action can safely be performed. Framed within the ProCLAIM model, we we aim to motivate the importance of these schemes and critical questions for: a) the Mediator Agent's guiding task that allows for a highly focused deliberation; b) the effective participation of heterogeneous agents; and c) enabling the reuse of previous similar deliberations in order to evaluate arguments on an evidential basis.

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Agents Deliberating over Action Proposals Using the ProCLAIM Model

Cited by 18 publications

References 10 publications

Towards real-time agreements

Towards real-time agreements

A Formal Argumentation Framework for Deliberation Dialogues

Deliberation dialogues for reasoning about safety critical actions

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