The Benefits of Arguing in a Team

In a complex, dynamic multi-agent setting, coherent team actions are often jeopardized by conflicts in agents’ beliefs, plans and actions. Despite the considerable progress in teamwork research, the challenge of intra-team conflict resolutionhas remained largely unaddressed. This paper presents CONSA, a system we are developing to resolve conflicts using argumentation-based negotiations. CONSA is focused on exploiting the benefits of argumentation in a team setting. Thus, CONSA casts conflict resolution as a team problem, so that the recent advances in teamwork can be brought to bear during conflict resolution to improve argumentation flexibility. Furthermore, since teamwork conflicts sometimes involve past teamwork, teamwork models can be exploited to provide agents with reusable argumentation knowledge. Additionally, CONSA also includes argumentation strategies geared towards benefiting the team rather than the individual, and techniques to reduce argumentation overhead.