Argument-based agreements in agent societies

Heras, Stella; Botti, Vicente; Julián, Vicente

doi:10.1016/j.neucom.2011.02.022

Cited by 15 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 11 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Thus any semantics of Dung's-like abstract argumentaion frameworks can be also applied in our framework [15]: Definition 2 (Argumentation Framework for an Agent Society) An argumentation framework for an agent society is a tuple AFAS = <A, R, S t > where: A is a set of arguments; R is an irreflexive binary attack relation on A; and S t is a society of agents as defined in [15].…”

Section: The Case-based Notion Of Argumentmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

An ontological-based knowledge-representation formalism for case-based argumentation

2014

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In open multi-agent systems, agents can enter or leave the system, interact, form societies, and have dependency relations with each other. In these systems, when agents have to collaborate or coordinate their activities to achieve their objectives, their different interests and preferences can come into conflict. Argumentation is a powerful technique to harmonise these conflicts. However, in many situations the social context of agents determines the way in which agents can argue to reach agreements. In this paper, we advance research in the computational representation of argumentation frameworks by proposing a new ontological-based, knowledge-representation formalism for the design of open MAS in which the participating software agents are able to manage and exchange arguments with each other taking into account the agents' social context. This formalism is the core of a case-based argumentation framework for agent societies. In addition, we present an example of the performance of the formalism in a real domain that manages the requests received by the technicians of a call centre.

show abstract

Section: The Case-based Notion Of Argumentmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…By sharing the ArgCBROnto ontology, heterogeneous agents engaged in an argumentation dialogue like this could convey and understand the information of the positions and arguments generated. Our argumentation framework has also been applied to manage the water resources of a river basin [15].…”

Section: Printererrors Hardwareerrorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

An ontological-based knowledge-representation formalism for case-based argumentation

2014

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Then, a proponent agent can decide if an opponent's argument conflicts with its argument and hence, its argument is deemed acceptable, non-acceptable or remains undecided (it cannot make a decision over it). This evaluation is performed by using the defeat relation between arguments defined in the original case-based argumentation framework (Heras et al, 2012), which specifies which attacks over arguments succeed. If the proponent argument defeats the opponent's, the latter acceptability status will change to non-acceptable.…”

Section: Argument Managementmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Also, they can be linked by di↵erent types of dependency relations in what we call an agent society (Heras et al, 2012). The high dynamism of the application domains of open MAS requires agents to have a way of harmonising the conflicts that come out when they have to collaborate or coordinate their activities.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards real-time agreements

Navarro

Heras

Botti

et al. 2013

Expert Systems with Applications

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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...

show abstract

“…However, if no negotiation experiences are available about the different opponents, or there is not enough data to make conclusions about which opponents should be chosen, teams may resort discuss about the different opponents via argumentation in groups (126,127,128,129,130). Once the evaluation of the different opponents has been carried out, the selection of a subset of negotiating opponents may be carried out by means of classic social choice techniques like voting (131).…”

Section: Opponent Selectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Complex negotiations in multi-agent systems.

Anguix¹

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Multi-agent systems (MAS) are distributed systems where autonomous entities called agents, either human or software, pursue their own goals. The MAS paradigm has been proposed as the appropriate modeling approach for the deployment of applications like electronic commerce, multi-robot systems, security applications, and so forth. In the MAS community, the vision of open multi-agent system, where heterogeneous agents can enter and leave the system dynamically, has gained strength as a potentially interesting modeling paradigm due to its conceptual relation with technologies like world wide web, grid computing, and virtual organizations. Given the heterogeneity and agent's self-interest, conflict is a candidate phenomenon to arise in multi-agent systems.In the last few years, the term agreement technologies has been used to address all the mechanisms that, directly or indirectly, promote the resolution of conflicts in computational systems like multi-agent systems. Among agreement technologies, automated negotiation is proposed as one key mechanism in conflict resolution due to its analogous use in human conflict resolution. Automated negotiation consists of an automated exchange of proposals carried out by software agents on behalf of their users. The final goal is the achievement of an agreement with all the involved parts.Despite being studied by scholars in Artificial Intelligence for several years, several problems have not been addressed by the scientific community yet. The main objective of this thesis is proposing negotiation models for complex scenarios where the complexity may stem from (i) limited computational capabilities or (ii) the necessity to accommodate the preferences of multiple individuales. In the first part of the thesis we propose a bilateral negotiation model for the problem of negotiation in Ambient Intelligence (AmI), a domain with a special emphasis iii on computational efficiency due to the limited capability of AmI devices. In the second part of the thesis we propose several negotiation models for agent-based negotiation teams. A negotiation team is a group of individuals that acts together as single negotiation party due to its common interests in the negotiation at hand.The complexity of negotiation teams resides in the fact that despite having common interests, intra-team conflict is also present. As far as we are concerned, the topic of negotiation teams in MAS is introduced with this thesis.iv ResumenLos sistemas multi-agente (SMA) son sistemas distribuidos donde entidades autó-nomas llamadas agentes, ya sean humanos o software, persiguen sus propios objetivos. El paradigma de SMA ha sido propuesto como la aproximación de modelo apropiada para aplicaciones como el comercio electrónico, los sistemas multi-robot, aplicaciones de seguridad, etc. En la comunidad de SMA, la visión de sistemas multi-agente abiertos, donde agentes heterogéneos pueden entrar y salir del sistema dinámicamente, ha cobrado fuerza como paradigma de modelado debido a su relación conceptual con tecnolo...

show abstract

Argument-based agreements in agent societies

Cited by 15 publications

References 11 publications

An ontological-based knowledge-representation formalism for case-based argumentation

An ontological-based knowledge-representation formalism for case-based argumentation

Towards real-time agreements

Complex negotiations in multi-agent systems.

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About