An Approach to Establish the Negotiation Agenda in Argumentation-Based Contexts

During a multi-issue negotiation, negotiators must decide which issues to include in a negotiation agenda and in which order these issues should be negotiated. In this context, if negotiators change the order of issues in the agenda, the outcome of the negotiation can be affected. Here, we analyse the use of an argumentation-based negotiation planning approach to set this agenda in an argumentation-based negotiation context. In this approach, an agent builds argumentation plans, in which the actions represent the arguments that the negotiator should use to persuade its opponents. These plans integrated into the general planning process allow the agent to establish a negotiation agenda by determining in advance what opponents could be persuaded, what issues could be agreed and what is the order in which the issues should be negotiated. A case of study shows how this information is obtained. Finally, the experiments confirmed that the effectiveness and performance of the agent that establishes a negotiation agenda increase when the negotiation context offers multiple alternatives to negotiate.