Automated argumentation-based social trust negotiation in collaborative networks

• Collaboration successful in Collaborative Networks largely depends on social trust. • Negotiation is required to create alliances where social trust is guaranteed. • Argument-based negotiation is necessary due to the subjective nature of social trust. • Automated negotiation improves the negotiation process between partners. • Multi-agent systems and argumentation techniques are combined in the proposal. Collaboration is an inherent property in Collaborative Networks (CNs), that are increasingly becoming the mainstay of manufacturing and production firms. Collaboration success largely depends on trust. Therefore, trust should be managed in an explicit manner when selecting partners to collaborate with in a CN. Traditionally, the partner selection approaches that explicitly consider trust as a selection criterion manage it as a single concept. However, trust is a multidimensional concept, and each dimension has unique influences on business relationships. The focus of the paper is precisely on the social dimension of trust, which has proven to be of special relevance in CNs. The goal is to allow partners to create alliances where this trust dimension is guaranteed, thus maximizing the chances of successful collaboration. To achieve this, an innovative automated argumentation-based negotiation framework is proposed. In this framework, partners will be modelled as agents in a Multi-Agent System, where automated argumentation techniques are widely used, and they will use different types of arguments to negotiate their social trust requirements. A prototype developed in NetLogo was used to test the proposed framework using the Spanish network on environmental DMAs (Red Española de DMAs Ambientales, REDMAAS), a Spanish thematic research network funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (RED2018-102594-T).