Design of a Participatory Decision Making Agent Architecture Based on Argumentation and Influence Function - Application to a Serious Game about Biodiversity Conservation

This paper addresses an ongoing experience in the design of an artificial agent taking decisions and combining them with the decisions taken by human agents. The context is a serious game research project, aimed at computer-based support for participatory management of protected areas (and more specifically national parks) in order to promote biodiversity conservation and social inclusion. Its objective is to help various stakeholders (e.g., environmentalist, tourism operator) to collectively understand conflict dynamics and explore negotiation strategies for the management of parks. In this paper, after introducing the design of our serious game, named SimParc, we will describe the architecture of the decision making agent playing the role of the park manager. In the game, the park manager makes final decisions based on its own analysis and also on the votes of the stakeholders. It includes two modules: 1) individual decision – based on a model of argumentation, which also provides a basis to justify and explain the decision; 2) participatory decision – to take into account the preferences/votes from the stakeholders.