Dialectical Planning: Designing a mediating system for group decision making

Planning of real world instances has to be performed through a lot of debates, negotiations and arguments between groups of planning agents. Conflicts of interest are inevitable and support for achieving consensus and compromise is required. The identification and selection among alternative courses of action have to be supported with rational, fair and effective decision-making models, especially in the prevailing cases of limited and uncertain information. Dialectical Planning is among the most promising application areas for what we call Computational Dialectics, that is computational models of norms of rational discourse. Work presented in this paper focuses on the design and implementation of such a mediating system for supporting group planning founded on a normative model of limited rationality.