Weighted Argumentation Systems: A Tool for Merging Argumentation Systems

Abstract

In this paper, we address the problem of merging argumentation systems (AS) in a multi-agent setting. Each agent's system may be built from different sets of arguments and/or different interactions between these arguments. The merging process must lead to solve conflicts between the agents and to identify ASs representing the knowledge of the group of agents. Previous work [6] has proposed a two-step merging process in which conflicts about an interaction result in a new kind of interaction, called ignorance. However, this merging process is computationally expensive, and does not provide a single resulting AS. We propose a novel approach to overcome these limitations by introducing a refinement of the ignorance relation under the form of a weighted attack. Our merging process takes only one step and provides a single weighted AS, which is easy to compute.