44, Towards Interest-Based Negotiation

Goal Arguments (which justify agents' adoption of certain goals) in the paper 'Towards Interest-Based Negotiation' (TIBN) by Iyad Rahwan et al take the form ((SuperG,B,SubG):G), i.e. an agent adopts (intends) a goal (G) because it believes G is instrumental to achieve its supergoal (SuperG), believes the context (B) which justifies G to be true and believes the plan (SubG) for achieving G to be achievable.

We identify here a few forms of attacks allowed (in TIBN) on these Goal Arguments for which we have equivalents in our multi-agent setting of 'On the Benefits of Argumentation for Negotiation' (OBAN).

(1)
- Attack in TIBN: For a Goal Argument ((SuperG,B,SubG):G), show ¬b where b is a belief in B, i.e. disqualifying a context condition.
- Similar attack in OBAN: Agent Y argues "I do not have resource R", where "you have resource R" is a belief agent X has (& utters) as part of either requesting R from Y or requesting R2 from Y. In the latter case, X's prior argument would be: "Y does not need R2 because Y has R (which alone is sufficient for fulfilling Y's goal)".

(2)
- Attack in TIBN: For a Goal Argument ((SuperG,B,SubG):G), show ¬p where p is a goal in SubG, i.e. a subgoal is unachievable.
- Similar attack in OBAN: Agent Y argues "I need to retain resource R (and hence your (sub)goal of obtaining R is unachievable)", where R is a resource agent X requests from Y.

(3)
- Attack: For a Goal Argument ((SuperG,B,SubG):R), show set of goals P such that achieve(P,G) where G is a goal in SuperG and R is not a goal in P, i.e. there is an alternative plan P which achieves the supergoal G and does not include R.
- Similar attacks in OBAN (in the case where R is a resource ("goal" in the language of TIBN) agent X requests from agent Y):
--- X argues "you do not need resource R (since you have a resource R2 that alone is sufficient for fulfilling your supergoal G)".
--- X argues "you do not need resource R (since I have a resource R2 that alone is sufficient for fulfilling your supergoal G and I will exchange with you R2 for R)".