Using Case-Based Reasoning and Principled Negotiation to provide decision support for dispute resolution

The growing use of Information Technology in the commercial arena leads to an urgent need to find alternatives to traditional dispute resolution. New tools from fields such as artificial intelligence (AI) should be considered in the process of developing novel online dispute resolution (ODR) platforms, in order to make the ligation process simpler, faster and conform with the new virtual environments. In this work, we describe UMCourt, a project built around two sub-fields of AI research: Multi-agent Systems and Case-Based Reasoning, aimed at fostering the development of tools for ODR. This is then used to accomplish several objectives, from suggesting solutions to new disputes based on the observation of past similar disputes, to the improvement of the negotiation and mediation processes that may follow. The main objective of this work is to develop autonomous tools that can increase the effectiveness of the dispute resolution processes, namely by increasing the amount of meaningful information that is available for the parties.