The use of agents in Electronic Commerce (EC) environments leads to the necessity to introduce some formal analysis and definitions.
Negotiations which take into account a multi-step exchange of
arguments provide extra information, at each step, for the intervening agents, enabling them to react accordingly. This
argument-based negotiation among agents has much to gain from the use of logical mechanisms. Although the use of logic to express arguments in Law is
well known, EC poses new challenges. Concepts such as
round and
probable conflict are important in the formalization of negotiation arguments. The ideas of
conflict/attack and victory/defeat are some of the most important to be formalized.
Incomplete information is common in EC scenarios therefore, arguments must take into account the presence of statements with
an unknown valuation.
The set of rules that is to express the knowledge of an agent needs priorization; i.e., some rules have a higher priority than others. Priorities are usually set by the relative ordering of clauses, however,
through knowledge classification and the introduction of embedded priority rules, an higher flexibility is reached.
Keywords argument-based negotiation - agents - logic - formal specification