An Implementation of a Lightweight Argumentation Engine for Agent Applications

Argumentation is becoming increasingly important in the design and implementation of autonomous software agents. In this paper we discuss our current work on a prototype lightweight Java-based argumentation engine that can be used to implement a non-monotonic reasoning component in Internet or agent-based applications. As far as possible we are aiming towards implementing a general purpose argumentation engine that can be configured to conform to one of a range of semantics.