The allocation of resources within a system of autonomous agents, that not only have preferences over alternative allocations of resources but also actively participate in computing an allocation, is an exciting area of research at the interface of Computer Science and Economics. This paper is a survey of some of the most salient issues in Multiagent Resource Allocation. In particular, we review various languages to represent the preferences of agents over alternative allocations of resources as well as different measures of social welfare to assess the overall quality of an allocation. We also discuss pertinent issues regarding allocation procedures and present important complexity results. Our presentation of theoretical issues is complemented by a discussion of software packages for the simulation of agent-based market places. We also introduce four major application areas for Multiagent Resource Allocation, namely industrial procurement, sharing of satellite resources, manufacturing control, and grid computing.

Over the last ten years, argumentation has come to be increasingly central as a core study within Artificial Intelligence (AI). The articles forming this volume reflect a variety of important trends, developments, and applications covering a range of current topics relating to the theory and applications of argumentation. Our aims in this introduction are, firstly, to place these contributions in the context of the historical foundations of argumentation in AI and, subsequently, to discuss a number of themes that have emerged in recent years resulting in a significant broadening of the areas in which argumentation based methods are used. We begin by presenting a brief overview of the issues of interest within the classical study of argumentation: in particular, its relationshipin terms of both similarities and important differences-to traditional concepts of logical reasoning and mathematical proof. We continue by outlining how a number of foundational contributions provided the basis for the formulation of argumentation models and their promotion in AI related settings and then consider a number of new themes that have emerged in recent years, many of which provide the principal topics of the research presented in this volume.

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Abstract. The study of extension-based semantics within the seminal abstract argumentation model of Dung has largely focused on definitional, algorithmic and complexity issues. In contrast, matters relating to comparisons of representational limits, in particular, the extent to which given collections of extensions are expressible within the formalism, have been under-developed. As such, little is known concerning conditions under which a candidate set of subsets of arguments are "realistic" in the sense that they correspond to the extensions of some argumentation framework AF for a semantics of interest. In this paper we present a formal basis for examining extension-based semantics in terms of the sets of extensions that these may express within a single AF. We provide a number of characterization theorems which guarantee the existence of AFs whose set of extensions satisfy specific conditions and derive preliminary complexity results for decision problems that require such characterizations.