Towards Automating Decision Aiding Through Argumentation

Decision aiding can be abstractly described as the process of assisting a user/client/decision maker by recommending possible courses of his action. This process has to be able to cope with incomplete and/or inconsistent information and must adapt to the dynamics of the environment in which it is carried out. Indeed, on the one hand, complete information about the environment is almost impossible, and on the other hand, the information provided by the user is often affected by uncertainty; it may contains inconsistencies and may dynamically be revised because of various reasons. The aim of this paper is to present a model of the decision aiding process that is amenable to automation. The main features of the approach is that it models decision aiding as an iterative defeasible reasoning process, and it uses argumentation for capturing important aspects of the process. More specifically, argumentation is used for representing the relations between the cognitive artefacts that are involved in decision aiding, as well as for modelling the artefacts themselves. In modelling the cognitive artefacts, we make use of the notion of argument schemes and specify the related critical questions. More specifically, the work reported here aims at initiating a systematic study of the use of argumentation in future decision aiding tools. Our ambition is twofold: (i) enhance decision support capabilities of an analyst representing explicitly and accountably the reasons for which he recommend a solution for a decision maker and (ii) enhance decision support capabilities of an (semi) automatic device to handle (at least partially) the dialogue with the user.