Adaptive Strategies for Practical Argument-Based Negotiation

Recent years have seen an increasing interest of multiagent system research in employing the theory of argumentation for the development of communication protocols. While significant progress has been made in formalising argument-based communication, (possibly adaptive) agent-level argumentation strategies as a practical integration of rational agent reasoning and inter-agent dialogue have received fairly little attention. In this paper we propose an implementation of a simplified form of argument-based negotiation using a generic social reasoning framework. This framework allows for strategic and adaptive communication towards private goals within the limits of rationality. The feasibility of the approach is illustrated in an agent-based web linkage scenario, showing that its performance is comparable to that of simple proposal-based negotiation while imposing much stricter and much more realistic constraints.