An Argumentation-based Approach for Identifying and Dealing with
  Incompatibilities among Procedural Goals
  During the first step of practical reasoning, i.e. deliberation, an
intelligent agent generates a set of pursuable goals and then selects which of
them he commits to achieve. An intelligent agent may in general generate
multiple pursuable goals, which may be incompatible among them. In this paper,
we focus on the definition, identification and resolution of these
incompatibilities. The suggested approach considers the three forms of
incompatibility introduced by Castelfranchi and Paglieri, namely the terminal
incompatibility, the instrumental or resources incompatibility and the
superfluity. We characterise computationally these forms of incompatibility by
means of arguments that represent the plans that allow an agent to achieve his
goals. Thus, the incompatibility among goals is defined based on the conflicts
among their plans, which are represented by means of attacks in an
argumentation framework. We also work on the problem of goals selection; we
propose to use abstract argumentation theory to deal with this problem, i.e. by
applying argumentation semantics. We use a modified version of the "cleaner
world" scenario in order to illustrate the performance of our proposal.
