Designing an argumentative decision-aiding tool for urban planning. AIPA : an interface between multicriteria decision aiding and argumentative frameworks

Urban planning is an important issue for all cities. In order to meet the challenges of sustainable urban planning, we propose a participative decision-support tool that allows stakeholders to engage jointly in structuring a decision process, to identify alternatives, to construct criteria, to challenge their relevance and to evaluate them. The novelty in our approach is the use of an argumentative approach to support multicriteria decision aiding. The use of an argumentative framework allows the stakeholders to formalize the decision problem by taking explicitly into account the diverse opinions expressed and ensuring their traceability. Through the argumentative approach, our goal is thus to enhance participatory decision making by organizing and formalizing debates between stakeholders. To this effect, we propose AIPA, an interface the makes the transition between natural language and abstract argumentation systems. Our aim is to place debates at the center of the decision analysis process in order to facilitate the acceptance of the final decision by all parties.