Dialogue and argumentation in multi-agent diagnosis

Abstract

In this paper, we make a first step towards a formal model of dialogue and argumentation for a multi-agent (model-based) diagnostic system. We shall discuss some of the issues in multi-agent cooperative fault diagnosis, the theories of communicating agents and their reasoning capabilities. We propose a Partial Information State (PIS)-based framework for dialogue and argumentation. We shall employ a three-valued based nonmonotonic logic for representing and reasoning about partial information. We show via an example that the system can easily be customized to handle distributed problem-solving tasks. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.