ARGUMENTATION-BASED ONE-TO-MANY
NEGOTIATION MODEL
Guorui Jiang and Sheng Chen
School of Economics and Management, Beijing University of Technology, Chaoyang, Beijing, China
Keywords: Argumentation-based negotiation, Dialogue game protocols, Multi-agents.
Abstract: Today, within the field of multi-agent systems, the theory of argumentation has become instrumental in
designing rich interaction protocols and in providing agents with a means to manage and resolve conflicts.
However, to date much of the existing literature focuses argumentation models based on two agents and
tends to overlook the influence on knowledge base and the relationship between different negotiation
processes. To end this, this paper presents an argumentation-based one-to-many negotiation model. The
contributions are three points: First, we present an argumentation model based on knowledge set with
different influence. Second, we extend a protocol based on dialogue game to govern the agent interactions
and the update of knowledge bases in one-to-many negotiation. In doing so, our model can collect the
knowledge from other negotiating partners and use it in the negotiation with another negotiating partner.
1 INTRODUCTION
Argumentation-based negotiation (Rahwan et at.,
2004) which is gaining increasing popularity for
allows agents to exchange additional information, or
to challenge about their beliefs and other mental
attitudes during the negotiation process has potential
ability to overcome the limitations of more
conventional approaches to automated negotiation.
There are many frameworks of argumentation-based
negotiation having been proposed by many scholars,
such as Carles Sierra (Sierra et al., 1997), Amgoud
(Amgoud et al., 2000a), Sarit Kraus (Kraus et al.,
1998). The key elements of argumentation-based
framework contain communication and domain
languages, the negotiation protocol, and various
information stores, argument and proposal
evaluation, argument and proposal generation and
argument selection (Guorui & Xiaoyu, 2009).
However, to date much of the existing literature
focuses argumentation models based on two agents
and tends to overlook the influence on knowledge
base and the relationship between different
negotiation processes. Actually, how to arrange and
update the knowledge in database is an important
problem in argumentation negotiation. The agent can
collect the information from different negotiation
processes or different opponents. So, this paper
presents an one-to-many argumentation negotiation
model that focuses on the arranging and updating the
knowledge of agents during negotiating.
2 THE ARGUMENTATION
MODEL
The agent’s reasoning model is specified using
argumentation model. This work is inspired by the
work of Dung (Dung, 1995) and Leila Amgoud
(Amgoud et al., 2000b) but goes further in dealing
with influence between arguments which come from
different knowledge base in a set of knowledge
bases.
An agent has many knowledge bases during one-
to-many negotiation. Let
0
Γ be the private
knowledge base of the agent, and
12
, ,...,
n
ΓΓ Γbe the
knowledge bases that store the knowledge comes
from the negotiating agents
12
, ,...,
n
Ag Ag Ag
respectively. We can organize the set of knowledge
bases in the form of a tree. Each base is supposed to
be consistent. We assume knowledge bases contain
formulas of a propositional language