A practical application approach to argumentation for multicriteria analysis and decision support

Abstract

The paper explores, through an application example, connections between argumentation and another type of methods often involved in decision problems, namely multicriteria analysis. A novel argumentative analysis framework is proposed and applied to assess a short supply chain device for food aid, regarding different categories of criteria. The analysis leads to some feedback concerning argumentation systems.

Reduced Meat Consumption: from Multicriteria Argument Modelling to Agent-Based Social Simulation

“…Abstract argumentation led to further analysis and, in particular, the rejection of attacked arguments without any argument to defend them. Such analyses allow for new indicators such as those that measure the degree of controversy based on rejected argument ratios (Thomopoulos, 2018;Thomopoulos et al, 2017), which can better identify potential controversies. The present work illustrates a promising coupling of the argumentation theory and agent-based modeling.…”

“…In order to model arguments involved in vegetarian transitions, we used an abstract argumentation approach (Dung, 1995;Rahwan & Simari, 2009;Thomopoulos, 2018). An argumentation system is usually represented as an oriented graph where nodes are arguments and edges are attack relations between arguments (Figure 1).…”

“…In this framework, an argumentation system is defined by a set of arguments A, and an attack relation between arguments R. Sets of arguments that "make sense" together are then computed and are referred to as extensions. In a subsequent study (Thomopoulos, 2018), various indicators were defined to analyze argumentation systems by highlighting consensual and non-consensual aspects of the issue debated.…”

Coupling Agent-Based Models and Argumentation Framework to Simulate Opinion Dynamics: Application to Vegetarian Diet Diffusion

“…It is a reasoning model based on the construction and evaluation of interacting arguments. It has been formalized both in philosophy and in computer science [23] and applied to various domains including non-monotonic reasoning [9], decision making [28] or negotiation [16]. The system introduced in [9] consists of a set of arguments and a binary relation on that set, expressing conflicts among arguments.…”

“…Historically, the typical field of application of argumentation in computer science was the legal domain [22]. More recently, several studies proved its relevance in social-related concerns, medicine, food systems, chains, policies and controversies, especially for decision-making purposes [28].…”