Integrating Conversational Interaction and Constraint Based Reasoning in an Agent Building Shell

In this paper we identify several types of specific services that agent infrastructures must support, including complex interaction, decision making for individual utility maximization, team formation in organizations and multi-attribute negotiation. We describe each of these services in part and show how they are supported in an integrated manner to provide abstract functionality related to complex interaction and unified individual and social reasoning in multi-agent settings. We show that this range of services can be achieved by combining conversational technology at the interaction level with constraint satisfaction and optimization as a common reasoning infrastructure supporting the required reasoning services. All services are provided by generic components packaged into a Java written Agent Building Shell.