COMAS: A Multi-agent System for Performing Consensus Processes.

The need for achieving consensus in group decision making problems is a common and sometimes necessary task in a myriad of social and business environments. Different consensus reaching processes have been proposed in the literature to achieve agreement among a group of experts. Initially, such processes were guided by a human moderator, but afterwards, some proposals to facilitate such a process arose by automating the moderator tasks. However, not many consensus support systems have been developed so far, due to the difficulty to manage intelligent tasks and cope with the negotiation process involved in consensus. This paper aims to present an initial prototype of an automatic consensus support system, developed by using the multi-agent paradigm that provides intelligent tools and capacities to tackle the inherent complexity found in this problem. To do so, we focus on the consensus model considered, the multi-agent architecture designed to develop such a system, and the ontology used for reasoning and communication tasks.