Design of an argumentation-based negotiation support system

This paper proposes a framework to model the negotiation process using a dialectic based argumentation language, which preserves and captures the qualitative aspects of the negotiation process. The argumentation language helps in representing the structure of the negotiation process and provides a normative argumentative evaluation methodology to represent and capture the roles played by the different participants in the negotiation process. The design of a prototype negotiation support system is described along with its intended use. (Kersten et al 1991) and Persuader (Sycara 1991) which provide formalisms to explicitly represent goals, rules, and relationships using restructurable modelling representations. Restructurable modelling uses rule-based formalism to build consecutive representations of a negotiation problem and thus captures changes created by exogenous decisions and actions of dynamic agents. In this paper, we discuss the design and development of an argumentationbased negotiation framework which lies in the middle of the spectrum and thus shares the advantages of the above formal and informal systems.