Arguing over Goals for Negotiation: Adopting an Assumption-Based Argumentation Decision Support System - Efficient Decision Support Systems: Practice and Challenges from Current to Future - page 235

Amgoud & Prade (2009) present a general and abstract argumentation framework for
multi-criteria decision making which captures the mental states (goals, beliefs and
preferences) of the decision makers. For this purpose, the arguments prescribe actions to
reach goals if theses actions are feasible under certain circumstances. These arguments,
eventually conflicting, are balanced according to their strengths. Our specific and concrete
argumentation framework is in conformance with this approach. The argumentation-based
decision making process envisaged by (Amgoud & Prade, 2009) is split in different steps
where the arguments are successively constructed, weighted, confronted and evaluated.
By contrast, our computation interleaves the construction of arguments, the construction
of counterarguments, the evaluation of the generated arguments and the determination of
concessions. Moreover, our argumentation-based decision process suggests some decisions
even if low-ranked goals cannot be reached.
Bench-Capon & Prakken (2006) formalize defeasible argumentation for practical reasoning.
As in (Amgoud & Prade, 2009), they select the best course of actions by confronting and
evaluating arguments. Bench-Capon & Prakken focus on the abductive nature of practical
reasoning which is directly modelled within in our framework.
(Kakas & Moraitis, 2003) propose an argumentation-based framework for decision making
of autonomous agents. For this purpose, the knowledge of the agent is split and localized
in different modules representing different capabilities. As (Bench-Capon & Prakken,
2006) and (Amgoud & Prade, 2009), their framework is a particular instantiation of the
abstract argumentation (Dung, 1995). Whereas Kakas & Moraitis (2003) is committed to one
argumentation semantics, we can deploy our framework to several semantics by relying on
assumption-based argumentation.
Rahwan et al. (2003) distinguish different approaches for automated negotiation, including
game-theoretic approaches (e.g Rosenschein & Zlotkin (1994)), heuristic-based approaches
(e.g. Faratin et al. (1998)) and argumentation-based approaches (e.g. Amgoud et al. (2007);
Bench-Capon & Prakken (2006); Kakas & Moraitis (2003)) which allow for more sophisticated
forms of interaction. By adopting the argumentation-based approach of negotiation, agents
deal naturally with new information in order to mutually influence their behaviors. Indeed,
the two first approaches do not allow agents for exchanging opinions about offers. By
arguing (even if it is internally), agents can take into account the information given by its
interlocutors in a negotiation process (eg. rejecting some offers). Moreover, the agents
can make some concessions. In this perspective, Amgoud et al. (2007) propose a general
framework for argumentation-based negotiation. They define formally the notions of
concession, compromise and optimal solution. Our argumentation-based mechanism for
decision making can be used for exploiting such a feature. Morge & Mancarella (2010) have
proposed a realisation of the minimal concession strategy. By contrast, we have focus in
this paper on the concession-based mechanism of MARGO which model the intuition that
high-ranked goals are preferred to low-ranked goals which can be withdrawn. We adopt
a decision principle that is so higher-ranked goals should be pursued at the expense of
lower-ranked goals, and thus concessions enforcing higher-ranked goals should be preferred
to those enforcing lower-ranked goals. To our best knowledge, our argumentation framework
is the first concrete system including such a mechanism.
Finally, to the best of our knowledge, few implementation of argumentation over actions
exist. CaSAPI 6 (Gartner & Toni, 2007) and DeLP 7 (García & Simari, 2004) are restricted to

6 http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~dg00/casapi.html
7 http://lidia.cs.uns.edu.ar/DeLP