Agreement with Argumentation and Artifacts in an ADR Scenario

Conflicts are often inevitable in a social context. From a human point of view, cultural differences, individual interests, and partial awareness are often the causes of disputes. Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) is usually considered to be alternative to litigation, and can also be used to allow disputing parts to find an agreement.

In this work we propose a model and a technology to realise an agreement environment for an ADR system in a multi-agent scenario. The formal model, which enables rational agents to work together, is based on argumentation and dialogue system that provide the conflict definition and the rules of interaction. In order to ease the understanding of our model, we present a specification of the persuasion dialogue that is the fundamental form of dialogue in an ADR process. The general architecture proposed to build an ADR system exploits two artifacts abstractions – Co-Argumentation Artifact and Dialogue Artifact – that provide the suitable functionalities to coordinate the agents during the agreement process. The technological support for the artifacts is provided by the TuCSoN infrastructure, also exploiting a meta-programming technique in Prolog. Finally, in the paper we present a simplified example of the execution of a persuasion dialogue that emphasise the way in which interaction between agents takes place according to our approach.