DESIGN OF A PARTICIPATORY DECISION MAKING AGENT ARCHITECTURE BASED ON ARGUMENTATION AND INFLUENCE FUNCTION - APPLICATION TO A SERIOUS GAME ABOUT BIODIVERSITY CONSERVATION

This paper addresses an ongoing experience in the designof an artificial agent taking decisions and combining them with the de-cisions taken by human agents. The context is a serious game researchproject, aimed at computer-based support for participatory manage-ment of protected areas (and more specifically national parks) in orderto promote biodiversity conservation and social inclusion. Its objectiveis to help various stakeholders ( e. g. , environmentalist, tourism oper-ator) to collectively understand conflict dynamics and explore nego-tiation strategies for the management of parks. In this paper, afterintroducing the design of our serious game, named SimParc, we willdescribe the architecture of the decision making agent playing the roleof the park manager. In the game, the park manager makes finaldecisions based on its own analysis and also on the votes of the stake-holders. It includes two modules: 1) individual decision – based ona model of argumentation, which also provides a basis to justify andexplain the decision; 2) participatory decision – to take into accountthe preferences/votes from the stakeholders