Modeling Conflicts Between Agents in a Design Context

This chapter discusses the use of fine-grained agents to investigate conflicts during multi-agent design. Our goal is to study in detail the interactions, conflicts and conflict resolution that is possible with such a multi-agent system. The approach is to use Single Function Agents (SiFAs), each of which can perform a very specialized task, from a single point of view. These different points of view usually cause conflicts among agents, and these conflicts need to be resolved in order for the design process to be successful. This chapter presents a model of conflicts and negotiations in the SiFA framework, including a hierarchy of possible conflicts.