Practical Reasoning in an Argumentation-based Decision BDI Agent: a Case Study for Participatory Management of Protected Areas

Abstract

Abstract-This paper describes the implementation of an argumentation system used for participatory management of environmental protected areas, more precisely to model the decision of a park manager artificial agent. This implementation is based on a BDI agent architecture, namely the Jason/AgentSpeak framework/language. After introducing the principles of BDI architecture and of argumentation systems, we will detail how we model arguments within the BDI (BeliefDesire-Intention) architecture. Then, we present the argumentation-based model of deliberation and decision by the park manager agent as a case study. We show how our argument-based approach allows to model various cognitive profiles of park managers (more conservationist or more sensitive to social issues), through different knowledge bases. We show examples of decisions produced by the park manager agent and examples of traces of arguments used during deliberation, which could be a base for explaining decisions. Before concluding, we point out future directions, such as using argumentation as a basis for negotiation between various agents.

Reasoning in BDI agents using Toulmin's argumentation model

“…Argumentation is a possible approach to improve the BDI architecture to deal with such issues. Within agents, argumentation can be used as the inference process within a single agent, or a dialogue mechanism to allow agents to have advanced communication skills [19,18].…”

“…This work proposes a new approach for argumentation-based reasoning in BDI agents. Different approaches to argumentation-based reasoning can be found in the literature, for example [3,32,11,13,12,33,34,17,16,18,19,35]. None of them is based on Toulmin's Model of Argumentation.…”

“…In [19], the authors presented the implementation of an argumentation system for participatory management of protected environmental areas, specifically modeling a park management agent. This implementation was based on the BDI architecture, using the AgentSpeak language.…”

“…The main difference of the mechanism proposed in this paper in relation to the work in [17,18,16,19,21,22], is the use of Toulmin's model to make inferences in BDI agents, so an argument is decomposed into components, thereby facilitating its modeling and, if necessary, allowing a deeper analysis of how the reasoning was performed and, consequently, how to argue about it.…”

“…In the literature, there are many papers involving argumentation and multiagent systems, e.g. [9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22].…”