Conflict Resolution Protocols

Agents will disagree. This is not a failure — it is the entire point of having a council. If every agent reaches the same conclusion every time, you have redundancy, not collective intelligence. Conflict between agents means the problem has genuine trade-offs that need resolution. The question is not whether agents will disagree. The question is what happens next.

Conflict resolution follows a three-tier escalation protocol. Tier one is automated resolution — the voting mechanism handles the disagreement according to its configured rules. Majority overrules minority. Weighted votes produce a winner. Most conflicts resolve here without any special handling. Tier two is structured rebuttal — when the margin is close or the dissenting agent's confidence score exceeds a threshold, the council enters a rebuttal round. The dissenting agent presents its counter-analysis, and the other agents re-evaluate. This catches cases where the minority position has information the majority missed.

1. Tier 1: Automated Resolution The voting mechanism handles the conflict. Majority wins, weighted scores are tallied, or the designated authority decides. No additional process needed. This handles 80% of disagreements.
2. Tier 2: Structured Rebuttal Triggered when the dissent margin is narrow or the dissenting agent's confidence exceeds a configured threshold. The dissenter presents a structured counter-argument. All council members re-evaluate. If the vote flips, the rebuttal carried. If not, the original decision holds with the dissent logged.
3. Tier 3: Human Arbitration Triggered on deadlocks, safety-critical decisions, or when the council explicitly flags uncertainty. The full deliberation record — every agent's analysis, votes, and rebuttals — is packaged and escalated to a human operator. The human decides and the decision is logged as a precedent for future councils.