Adaptive negotiations with Gorgias' style of argumentation
Central control of all the computing entities composing contemporary software applications, particularly those involving the Internet, is not always possible or at times, not practical. With this in mind, a new technology vision was pursued by the SOCS project whereby entities would be capable of interacting without all the information about their dynamically changing environment. In trying to achieve this vision for a global computing environment, the concept of autonomous agents was employed as a useful abstraction for describing computing entities. Agents are autonomous in the sense that their activities are not centrally controlled. Larger structures composed of multiple agents would be characterised by 'social rules' governing their operation in the presence of each other. Project partners at the University of Cyprus were charged with the task of developing a framework to support agents in making decisions under a given preference policy. In general, preference policies have a dynamic nature and are influenced by the particular state of the environment in which the agent finds himself. The agent needs to be able to compare different alternatives and arrive at a conclusion that reflects the new input from the current environment. The proposed argumentation framework helps to capture the agent's social dimension and how this can vary depending on the external environment. In addition, Gorgias, named after the famous Sicilian rhetorician, encompasses the relative roles of agents. The role of each agent is expressed directly by means of priority rules, which themselves form arguments to be used in the decision-making process. This allows a higher degree of flexibility in agents' argumentative reasoning on their preferences. Moreover, Gorgias effectively deals with the incompleteness of agents' knowledge of the external environment and illustrates how an agent's self-deliberation can affect its interaction with other agents. Researchers at the University of Cyprus are currently studying how to combine the proposed argumentation framework with work from cognitive psychology and through this, define different agent personalities.
