Agreement Technologies for Conflict Resolution

Recently, artificial intelligence, has emerged as a new source of scientific works in conflict resolution. The interest in conflict resolution lies in diverse reasons. One of the main reasons is that computational systems have gradually shifted towards a distributed paradigm where heterogeneous entities should include computational conflict resolution mechanisms, such as proposed by agreement technologies. This chapter gives an overview of these technologies, which are needed in order to ensure the accomplishment of the global system goal and to solve conflicts. Among agreement technologies, automated negotiation is proposed as one key mechanism in conflict resolution due to its analogous use in human conflict resolution. Automated negotiation consists of an automated exchange of proposals carried out by software agents on behalf of their users. Another key technology is argumentation, which provides a fruitful means of dealing with conflicts and knowledge inconsistencies. Agents can reach agreements by engaging in argumentation dialogues with their opponents in a discussion.