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Agreeing on Institutional Goals for Multi-agent Societies

  • Conference paper
Coordination, Organizations, Institutions and Norms in Agent Systems IV (COIN 2008)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 5428))

Abstract

We present an argumentation-based approach to the problem of finding a set of institutional goals for multi-agent systems. The behaviour of the autonomous agents we consider in this paper is goal-directed, driven by either individual or common goals. When multiple agents want to set up a collaboration framework (for themselves or others to use), they do so by forming an institution (or organisation). The goals of such institution must be agreed upon by the agents setting up the framework before it can be executed.

We propose to use argumentation, and in particular assumption-based argumentation, to facilitate the negotiation of institutional goals. We first describe a centralised approach and then provide the rationale for and detail our preliminary efforts at de-centralising the problem. We propose to employ the argumentation system CaSAPI as a tool to reason about the collaborative goals of the institution. Our approach mitigates concerns about performance bottlenecks and vulnerability of the system while providing, to some extent, privacy to the individual members of the institution.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. of Computing, Imperial College London, London, SW7 2AZ, UK

    Dorian Gaertner & Francesca Toni

  2. IIIA-CSIC, Campus de la UAB, 08193, Bellaterra, Spain

    Dorian Gaertner & Juan Antonio Rodríguez-Aguilar

Authors
  1. Dorian Gaertner
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  2. Juan Antonio Rodríguez-Aguilar
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  3. Francesca Toni
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Multi-agent Systems Department, EMS Mines Saint-Etienne, 158 Cours Fauriel, 42023, Saint-Etienne Cedex 02, France

    Jomi Fred Hübner

  2. Purdue University, 70907, West Lafayette, IN, USA

    Eric Matson

  3. ENS Mines Saint-Etienne, 42023, Saint-Etienne, Cedex 02, France

    Olivier Boissier

  4. Dept. Information and Computing Sciences, Utrecht University, 3508TB, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Virginia Dignum

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© 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Gaertner, D., Rodríguez-Aguilar, J.A., Toni, F. (2009). Agreeing on Institutional Goals for Multi-agent Societies. In: Hübner, J.F., Matson, E., Boissier, O., Dignum, V. (eds) Coordination, Organizations, Institutions and Norms in Agent Systems IV . COIN 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 5428. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-00443-8_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-00443-8_1

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-00442-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-00443-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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