Accepted, Forthcoming



Papers from:2009, 2008, 2007, 2006

 

 

  • Building next generation Service-Oriented Architectures using argumentation agents.
    V. Curcin, M. Ghanem, Y. Guo, K. Stathis and F. Toni
    In Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Grid Services Engineering and Management (GSEM 2006), September, 2006. Erfurt, Germany. Lecture Notes in Informatics Vol. P-88, ISBN 978-3-88579-182-9.
    Abstract:   Motivated by the increased bioinformatics service-based offering on the Grid, we envisage a new model for programming the Grid at a semantic, knowledge-based level of abstraction through the use of argumentative agent technology. In this setting, agents are associated with roles of service requestors, service providers and brokers. This new model provides an enhanced service composition model for grid applications, whereby service requestors, providers and brokers can profit from the dynamic composition of Grid resources and services into executable workflows. This model would thus have considerable impact on existing business practices, by enhancing the role of Grid in current business applications. Within this model, argumentative agents are equipped with methods for negotiation with other agents. Agents act on behalf of their owners, be it in the consumer, provider or broker roles, or a combination thereof. With the support of argumentation processes, they decide how to fulfil the demands of their owners by creating, managing and joining virtual organisations, understood as societies of agents, while pursuing their own goals.

  • A dialectical procedure for sceptical, assumption-based argumentation.
    P.M. Dung, P. Mancarella, F. Toni,
    Proceedings 1st International Conference on Computational Models of Argument (COMMA 2006), September 2006, Liverpool (UK) IOS Press.
    Abstract:   We present a procedure for computing the sceptical “ideal semantics” for argumentation in assumption-based frameworks. This semantics was first proposed for logic programming, extending the well-founded semantics. The proof procedure is defined by means of a form of dispute derivations, obtained by modifying the existing notion of dispute derivations for computing credulous admissible argumentation. The new dispute derivations are sound for the “ideal semantics” in all cases where the dispute derivations are complete for admissible argumentation. We prove that this is the case for the special kind of assumption-based frameworks with a finite underlying language and with the property of being “p-acyclic”.

  • Egalitarian Allocations of Indivisible Resources: Theory and Computation.
    P.-A. Matt and F. Toni
    Proceedings 10th International Workshop on Cooperative Information Agents (CIA 2006), Edinburgh (UK) Lecture Notes in Computer Science 4149 Springer-Verlag.
    Abstract:   We present a mechanism for collaboration and coordination amongst agents in multi-agent societies seeking social equity. This mechanism allows to compute egalitarian allocations of indivisible resources to agents, reached via progressive revisions of social consensus. Egalitarian allocations are allocations with maximal egalitarian social welfare, where the egalitarian social welfare is given by the minimum worth (utility) assigned by agents to the resources they are given by the allocation. Egalitarian allocations are useful in a number of applications of multi-agent systems, e.g. service agents, satellite earth observation and agent oriented/holonic manufacturing systems. The mechanism we propose is distributed amongst the agents, and relies upon an incremental construction whereby agents join progressively in, forcing a revision of the current set of agreements amongst the prior agents. The mechanism uses search trees and a reduction operator simplifying the search for egalitarian allocations. We finally show how to reduce the negotiation time using social order-based coordination mechanisms and make agents find consensus efficiently using well-suited resource-preference orders.

  • Argumentation to compose services.
    Morge, M. and Routier JC. and Secq, Y.
    Proceedings of the 18th Belgian-Dutch conference of Artificial Intelligence (BNAI), October 2006, Belgium.
    Abstract:   We propose in this paper a framework for inter-agents dialogue on actions, which formalize a deliberative process. This framework bounds a dialectical system in which argumentative agents arbitrate and play to reach a practical agreement. For this purpose, we propose an argumentation-based reasoning to manage the conflicts between plans having different strengths for different agents. Moreover, we propose a model of agents which justify the plans to which they commit and take into account the plans of their interlocutors. In the scope of our dialectical system, an agent is responsible of the final decision outcome which is taken according to the autority of the players, the uttered plans and her own rules and priorities. We illustrate this paper with a services composition.

  • The distributed negotiation of egalitarian resource allocations.
    P.-A. Matt, F. Toni, D. Dionysiou
    Proceedings 1st International Workshop on Computational Social Choice (COMSOC 2006), December 2006, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
    Abstract:   We provide a sound theory for the computation of allocations of indivisible resources amongst cooperative agents, maximising the egalitarian social welfare of the overall multi-agent system, seen as a society. Agents' preferences over resources are captured by scalar utilities that we sum up to define the agents' individual welfare. The egalitarian social welfare is defined as the minimal individual welfare across the society. From the proposed theory we derive a mechanism of negotiation distributed over the agents. This mechanism is defined by means of a public communication protocol and a private computational policy that have the advantage of integrating efficient coordination and computational heuristics.