A Framework for Argumentation-Based Negotiation
Summary (3 min read)
1 Introduction
- In such environments, agents often have no inherent control over one another and so the only way they can influence one another’s behaviour is by persuasion.
- In other cases, the persuadee may be unwilling to accept the proposal initially and must be persuaded to change its beliefs, goals or preferences so that the proposal, or some variant thereof, is accepted.
- On leave from Laboratorio Nacional de Informática Avanzada—LANIA.
- The authors outline the components of a formal model for the process of argumentation-based negotiation which can ultimately be used to build negotiating agents for real world applications.
- Finally, the authors indicate how these arguments can be generated and interpreted by agents.
2 Argumentation in Business Process Management
- This section describes the scenario which will be used to illustrate the principles and concepts of their model of argumentation.
- The scenario is motivated by work in the ADEPT project [8] which has developed negotiating agents for business process management applications.
- In the case of bespoke services the process is more complex.
- If such a survey is warranted, the DD agent negotiates with the SD agent for the Survey Customer Site service.
- On completion of the network design and costing, the DD agent informs the CSD agent which informs the customer of the service quote.
3 Negotiation model
- The authors model describes the process of a single encounter negotiation between multiple agents over a deal.
- Deals are always between two agents, though an agent may be engaged simultaneously in negotiation with many agents for a given deal.
- The deliberation capability of the participating agents—in the form of an internal state in which the agent may register the history of the negotiation as well as the evolution of its own theoretical elements on which its decisions are founded.
- The minimal shared meaning of the acceptable illocutions—this is captured in the way that a received illocution should be interpreted when heard by an agent, and by making explicit the conditions that enable an agent to use (or ‘generate’) a given illocution at a given time.
- A minimal set of concepts which are necessary to represent the static components in automated negotiation are presented in Section 3.1, and the dynamic components—the concepts of a negotiation thread and a negotiation state—are introduced in Section 3.2.
3.1 A Basic Negotiation Ontology
- Negotiation requires communication between the agents and, for it to be unambiguous, each agent must have a unique identifier.
- (Note this constant does not mean “don’t care”.).
- In this work the authors adopt the simplest solution and assume a common language.
- The negotiation dialogue between two agents consists of a sequence of offers and counter offers containing values for the issues.
- This is followed by an exchange of possibly many counter proposals (that agents may reject) and many persuasive illocutions.
3.2 Negotiating agents
- The Dialogical Framework described in the previous section represents the static components of the negotiation model—those that are fixed for all negotiations.
- In order to capture essential aspects of persuasion it is necessary to assume that the agents have memory and are deliberative.
- In an extension to their previous work [16], the authors want to capture the idea that new issues may arise during the negotiation process.
- As an illustration of how these notions are used, consider the following example: Example 1.
- The CSD agent is negotiating with a V Ci agent for the Vet Customer service for company A.
3.3 Persuasive agents
- The other persuasive illocutionary acts, threaten a b not not t and reward a b not not t with CL, can contain arguments as long as and/or are appeals, or, recursively, contain appeals.
- In their domain, and in other work on MAS [2], the social role between the agents is a determining factor in deciding which argument should be preferred.
- Precisely which social roles correspond to a power relation between the agents depends on the particular domain.
- Given the two argument pairs Arg and Arg such that Attacks Arg Arg then Arg will be preferred to Arg , which the authors write as Arg Arg , if and only if Support Arg Support Arg .
- DD indicates that it must have the service completed within 24 hours.
3.4 Interpretation and Generation of Illocutions
- For pragmatic reasons, the authors separate the definition of the semantics of illocutions into two different operations, I and G (see examples 3 and 4).
- The underlying idea is that any illocution may introduce new issues into a negotiation, while appeals may, in addition, modify the preference relationships and the agent’s theory.
- Complete illocutionaryhistories allow agents with total recall to be modelled.
- The authors do not update agents’ theories in this minimal semantics because they wish to keep the interpretation of illocutions reasonably neutral with respect to the agents’ internal architectures.
- The following example illustrates a simple negotiation dialogue between two agents and contains a fragment of a G function.
5 Conclusion
- This paper has introduced a novel framework for describing persuasive negotiations between autonomous agents.
- The framework has been strongly influenced by their experience of business process management applications and this makes us confident that it can capture the needs of other real world applications.
- The authors realise that there are a number of issues which require further investigation.
- Finally, the authors make the simplifying assumption that negotiating agents have a common notion of deduction.
- This may be inadequate for some domains, in which case it will be necessary for agents to be able to discuss what rules of inference are appropriate.
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Cites background from "A Framework for Argumentation-Based..."
...The process involves agents putting forward agreements for and against propositions, together with justifications for the acceptability of these arguments [1, 53, 97, 98]....
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Cites background from "A Framework for Argumentation-Based..."
...to complement offers and counteroffers on negotiation promises, threats or enticements of different sorts, in order to persuade the others about a particular course of action [106, 112]....
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References
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"A Framework for Argumentation-Based..." refers background or methods in this paper
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...Fundamental to this view of decision making is the idea that one argument may attack another [3]....
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3,050 citations
"A Framework for Argumentation-Based..." refers background in this paper
...3 In keeping with the spirit of specifying a framework which is neutral with respect to the agent architecture, we do not commit to any specific formal language but note that could be as simple as a propositional language or as elaborate as a multi-modal BDI logic [10,14]....
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"A Framework for Argumentation-Based..." refers background in this paper
...If some additional criteria must be applied to decide which to keep, for instance epistemic entrenchment [4]....
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"A Framework for Argumentation-Based..." refers background in this paper
...These proposals can then either be accepted or rejected as is the case in the contract net protocol [16], for instance....
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Frequently Asked Questions (2)
Q2. What future works have the authors mentioned in the paper "A framework for argumentation-based negotiation" ?
Further work is required to tie these preferences to notions of rationality, in particular to standard ideas of expected utility. This may be inadequate for some domains, in which case it will be necessary for agents to be able to discuss what rules of inference are appropriate.