Making Shared Plans More Concise and Easier to Reason About
ATAL '98 Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Intelligent Agents V, Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages
RPD-enabled agents teaming with humans for multi-context decision making
AAMAS '06 Proceedings of the fifth international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems
Agent-based Analysis of Organizations: Formalization and Simulation
IAT '07 Proceedings of the 2007 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Intelligent Agent Technology
Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research
The dynamics of intention in collaborative activity
Cognitive Systems Research
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Agent-based simulation can be used to investigate behavioural requirements, capabilities and strategies that might be helpful in complex, dynamic and adaptive situations, and can be used in training scenarios. In this paper, we study the requirements of coordination in complex unfolding scenarios in which agents may come and go and where there is a dynamic organisational structure. This is a step on the way to developing a simulation framework that can be part of a training system in the domain of emergency management. We argue the need for an extension to the SharedPlans formalism required to support the sharing of knowledge about a dynamically unfolding situation, specifically: who is in the team? and who holds relevant knowledge? Our rationale for such an extension is presented based on a prior case study of a railway accident and a further analysis of the coordination and communication activities amongst the disaster management team during its recovery. We conclude that in addition to the obligations imposed by the standard SharedPlans framework, agents in complex unfolding scenarios also need knowledge cultivation processes to reason about the dynamic organisational structure and the changing world state. We briefly express the requirements of knowledge cultivation as obligations that could be imposed on agents. We argue that in order to facilitate appropriate knowledge cultivation, agents need access to explicit models of organisational knowledge. This knowledge encapsulates the relational structure of the team, along with shared beliefs, goals and plans. We briefly present a formal representation of this model in order to clearly identify the rich information needed in an adaptive organisation.