Developing a Negotiation-Based Intelligent Tutoring System to Support Problem Solving: A Case Study in Role-Play Learning

A negotiation-based intelligent tutoring system of which the tutor and learner agents in playing problem-specific roles is developed to assist learner in problem solving through a negotiation mechanism. During the problem solving, fuzzy constraint-directed negotiation is employed to coordinate the mutual thinking between tutor and learner agents, and it can resolve the cognition differences and thereby reach a consensus more effectively. To embody the idea of the proposed methodology, a real-world example relevant to the software cost estimation is described to illustrate how a negotiation can be used for supporting the problem solving in a tutoring learning environment.