Enforcement in Formal Argumentation

Within argumentation dynamics, a major strand of research is concerned with how changing an argumentation framework affects the acceptability of arguments, and how to modify an argumentation framework in order to guarantee that some arguments have a given acceptance status. In this chapter, we overview the main approaches for enforcement in formal argumentation. We mainly focus on extension enforcement, i.e., on how to modify an argumentation framework to ensure that a given set of arguments becomes (part of) an extension. We present different forms of extension enforcement defined in the literature, as well as several possibility and impossibility results. The question of minimal change is also considered, i.e., what is the minimal number of modifications that must be made to the argumentation framework for enforcing an extension. Computational complexity and algorithms based on a declarative approach are discussed. Finally, we briefly describe several notions that do not directly fit our definition of extension enforcement, but are closely related.