Towards Practical Argumentation-Based Dialogues in Multi-agent Systems

Although argumentation has been a prominent topic of research in artificial intelligence and in particular agent communication, there has been little work on practical (but provably sound) argumentation approaches integrated with agent programming languages. In this paper, we develop a formally-grounded mechanism for practical argumentation-based dialogues in an agent platform based on a multi-agent programming language. We formalise a protocol to govern such dialogues, where agents use an argumentation-based reasoning mechanism that has been implemented. We prove that dialogues following our protocol always terminate and that ideal solutions are reached under certain conditions. The protocol is simple but was shown to be useful in a multi-agent system application that supports teams of cooperating humans.