Affiliations: Dipartimento di Matematica e Informatica, Università di Perugia, Via Vanvitelli 1, Perugia, Italy | Instituto di Informatica e Telematica (CNR), Via Moruzzi 1, Pisa, Italy. bista@dmi.unipg.it, stefano.bistarelli@iit.cnr.it | Contraintes, INRIA - Rocquencourt, Domaine de Voluceau BP 105, Le Chesnay Cedex, France | Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica, Science Park 123, Amsterdam, The Netherlands | Dipartimento di Matematica e Informatica, Università di Perugia, Via Vanvitelli 1, Perugia, Italy. francesco.santini@inria.fr, F.Santini@cwi.nl, francesco.santini@dmi.unipg.it
Note: [] Address for correspondence: Contraintes, INRIA - Rocquencourt, Domaine de Voluceau BP 105, Le Chesnay Cedex, France
Abstract: The aggregation of generic items into coalitions leads to the creation of sets of homogenous entities. In this paper we accomplish this for an input set of arguments, and the result is a partition according to distinct lines of thought, i.e., groups of “coherent” ideas. We extend Dung's Argumentation Framework (AF) in order to deal with coalitions of arguments. The initial set of arguments is partitioned into not-intersected subsets. All the found coalitions show the same property inherited by Dung, e.g., all the coalitions in the partition are admissible (or conflict-free, complete, stable): they are generated according to Dung's principles. Each of these coalitions can be assigned to a different agent. We use Soft Constraint Programming as a formal approach to model and solve such partitions in weighted AFs: semiring algebraic structures can be used to model different optimization criteria for the obtained coalitions. Moreover, we implement and solve the presented problem with JaCoP, a Java constraint solver, and we test the code over a small-world network.
