Argumentative agent deliberation, roles and context

Abstract

This paper presents an argumentation based framework to support an agent's deliberation process for drawing conclusions under a given policy. The argumentative policy of the agent is able to take into account the roles agents can have within a context pertaining to an environment of interaction. The framework uses roles and context to define policy preferences at different levels of deliberation allowing a modular representation of the agent's knowledge that avoids the need for explicit qualification of the agent's decision rules. We also employ a simple form of abduction to deal with the incompleteness and evolving nature of the agent's knowledge of the external environment and illustrate how an agent's self deliberation can affect the mode of interaction between agents. The high degree of modularity of the framework gives it a simple computational model in which the agent's deliberation can be naturally implemented. © 2002 Published by Elsevier Science B.V.