Negotiation is a central process in an agent society where
autonomous agents have to cooperate in order to resolve conflicting interests
and yet compete to divide limited resources. A direct dialogical exchange of
information between agents usually leads to competitive forms of negotiation
where the most powerful agents win. Alternatively, an intelligent mediated
interaction may better achieve the goal of reaching a common agreement
and supporting cooperative negotiation. In both cases argumentation
is the reference framework to rationally manage conflicting knowledge
or objectives, a framework which provides the fundamental abstraction
“argument” to exchange pieces of information. In this paper we present a
novel conceptual framework for negotiation dialogues using argumentation
between autonomous software agents which enables their dialogues to
be automated. The framework, called SANA (Supporting Artifacts for
Negotiation with Argumentation), incorporates intelligent components able
to assist the agent participants to reach agreement by inferring mutuallyacceptable
proposals. The framework also permits agents to engage in
negotiation dialogues with each other, generating and exchanging proposed
deals and arguments for and against these proposals. Acceptability of
proposals is then assessed in terms of an agreed argumentation framework
semantics. We present the architecture of our framework, along with the
syntax, and outline denotational semantics of an associated agent interaction
protocol, called SANAP.
Keywords: Argumentation, Artifacts, Negotiation, Multi-agent Systems,
SANA Argumentation Framework, SANA Architecture, SANA Negotiation
Protocol, SANA Prototype, Dialogues, Logic programming.
