Designing and implementing B2B applications using argumentative agents

This paper presents a framework for modeling and deploying Businessto- Business (B2B) applications, with autonomous agents exposing the individual components that implement these applications. This framework consists of three levels identified by strategic, application, and resource, with focus here on the first two levels. The strategic level is about the common vision that independent businesses define as part of their decision of partnership. The application level is about the business processes that get virtually integrated as result of this common vision. Since conflicts are bound to arise among the independent applications/agents, the framework uses a formal model based upon computational argumentation theory through a persuasion protocol to detect and resolve these conflicts. In this protocol, agents can reason about partial information using partial arguments, partial attack and partial acceptability. Agents can then jointly find arguments supporting a new solution for their conflict, which is not known by any of them individually. Termination, soundness, and completeness properties of this protocol are presented. Distributed and centralized coordination strategies are also supported in this framework, which is illustrated with a simple online purchasing case study.