Towards large-scale conflict resolution: initial results

With the increasing interest in distributed and collaborative multi-agent applications, conflict resolution in large-scale systems becomes an important problem. Our approach to collaborative conflict resolution is based on argumentation. To understand the feasibility and the scope of the approach, we first implemented the process in a system called CONSA and applied it to two complex, dynamic domains. We then modeled this approach in distributed constraint satisfaction problems (DCSP) to investigate the effect of different conflict resolution configurations, such as the degree of shared responsibility and unshared information, and their effects in large-scale conflict resolution via argumentation. Our results suggest some interesting correlations between these configurations and the performance of conflict resolution.