User interface for multi-agent systems: A case study

The user interface is a crucial part of most computer applications. Specially in complex applications, the user interface very often determines the acceptance or the rejection of a program by the user. The design of graphical user interfaces for multi-agent systems is specially difficult due to the particular characteristics of these systems. This difficulty is even greater when we consider the existence of more than one user. In this paper we present a proposal for a general purpose multi-agent multi-user interface. This interface supports a user taxonomy and the ability to continuously learn about the aptitude of each user in order to choose the most correct interlocutor to interact with at each moment. Cooperative decisions and conflict resolution between users are also made possible trough the automatic negotiation of the different solutions envisaged for each problem. For this purpose, a negotiation algorithm for multi-user conflict resolution inspired by the Contract Net Protocol is presented and a specific systems user scoring procedure is proposed.