Argumentation is receiving an increasing attention as a technique for practical and uncertain reasoning underlying the realization of intelligent autonomous agents. Since a decentralized organization has been proposed by several authors as an appropriate paradigm for the design of agent architectures, we propose in this article, a distributed approach to argumentation, in which several independent asynchronous processes carry out argumentation activity, by exploiting local information only. The final result of this process is the computation of the defeat status of the arguments: we devise a general distributed algorithm, which does not rely on any specific notion of defeat between arguments. The issue of coordination has been explicitly tackled by ensuring the property of self-stabilization for the algorithm. A proof of its correctness, as well as an analysis of its complexity, is provided.
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