Arguing and Negotiating in the Presence of Social Influences

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, 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.

Argument-Based Negotiation in a Social Context

“…In addition to the above two issues, we believe that agents also require a language and a protocol to exchange these arguments, and a decision making functionality to generate such dialogues [15]. As mentioned in Section 3.1, our domain language flows naturally from our schema and the communication language is adapted from the works of Amgoud et al [12] and McBurney et al [14].…”

Exploiting Bulk Agent Approach for Conflict Resolution in Multi Agent Systems

“…Knowledge conflicts in a agent society can be occurred due to lack of knowledge, the motivation and/or the less or no capacity to work with the social influences [11]. The main reason behind this is the incomplete, diverse or conflicting information and influences.…”

“…So it is obvious that, such complex social influences could make incomplete information of agent's about the society, which results large amounts of knowledge conflicts at the same time. ABN provides promising solutions even for such knowledge conflicts [11]. However to resolve the conflicts with the knowledge in hand, it is required to have (i) a schema to reason in social settings; (ii) a mechanism to identify a suitable set of arguments; (iii) a language and a protocol to exchange these arguments; and (iv) a decision making functionality to generate such dialogues [11].…”

“…ABN provides promising solutions even for such knowledge conflicts [11]. However to resolve the conflicts with the knowledge in hand, it is required to have (i) a schema to reason in social settings; (ii) a mechanism to identify a suitable set of arguments; (iii) a language and a protocol to exchange these arguments; and (iv) a decision making functionality to generate such dialogues [11]. According to the first requirement it is required to have global understanding of set of rules to reason on social settings.…”

Managing Social Influences Through Argumentation-Based Negotiation

“…To enable agents to express their arguments, we define two complimentary languages: the domain language and the communication language (see [8] for a complete formal specification). The former allows the agents to express premises about their social context and also the conflicts that they may face while executing actions within such a context.…”