Modelling Time and Reliability in Structured Argumentation Frameworks

Argumentation is a human-like reasoning mechanism contributing to the formalization of commonsense reasoning. In the last decade, several argument-based formalisms have emerged, with application in many areas, such as legal reasoning, autonomous agents and multi-agent systems; many are based on Dung’s seminal work characterizing Abstract Argumentation Frameworks (AF). Recent research in the area has led to Temporal Argumentation Frameworks (TAF) that extend Dung’s by considering the temporal availability of arguments. In this work we introduce a novel framework, called Extended Temporal Argumentation Framework (E-TAF), extending TAF with the capability of modeling availability of attacks among arguments, which allows for instance to model reliability of arguments varying over time. We show how E-TAF can be enriched by considering Structured Abstract Argumentation, adding compositional elements to the abstract arguments involved based on a simplified version of the recently introduced Dynamic Argumentation Frameworks.