Modelling Coalitions: ATL + Argumentation

NILS BULLING; CARLOS CHESÑEVAR; JÜRGEN DIX

Estoril, Portugal

Conferencia; 7th International Conference on Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 08); 2008

In the last few years, argumentation frameworks have been successfully applied to multi agent systems. Recently, argumentation has been used to provide a framework for reasoning about coalition formation. At the same time alternating- time temporal logic has been used to reason about the behavior and abilities of coalitions of agents. However, ATL operators account only for the existence of successful strate- gies of coalitions. They do not consider whether coalitions can be actually formed. This paper is an attempt to combine both frameworks and to develop a logic through which we can reason at the same time (1) about abilities of coalitions of agents and (2) about the formation of coalitions. We provide a formal extension of ATL, ATLc, in which the actual computation of the coalition is modelled in terms of argumentation semantics. We show that ATLc´s proof theory can be understood as a natural extension of the model checking procedure used in ATL.