Towards conflict resolution in agent teams via argumentation

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 resolution has remained largely unaddressed. This paper presents a system called CONSA, to resolve conflicts using argumentation-based negotiations. The key insight in CONSA is to fully exploit 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 fully brought to bear during conflict resolution to improve argumentation flexibility. Furthermore, since teamwork conflicts often involve past teamwork, recently developed 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. We present detailed algorithms used in CONSA and initial results from CONSA’s application. 1