Agents with shared mental models for enhancing team decision makings

  • Authors:

  • John Yen;Xiaocong Fan;Shuang Sun;Timothy Hanratty;John Dumer

  • Affiliations:

  • School of Information Sciences and Technology, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, United States;School of Information Sciences and Technology, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, United States;School of Information Sciences and Technology, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, United States;US Army Research Laboratory, Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD 21005, United States;US Army Research Laboratory, Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD 21005, United States

  • Venue:
  • Decision Support Systems - Special issue: Intelligence and security informatics
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

Proactive information sharing is a challenging issue faced by intelligence agencies in effectively making critical decisions under time pressure in areas related to homeland security. Motivated by psychological studies on human teams, a team-oriented agent architecture, Collaborative Agents for Simulating Teamwork (CAST), was implemented to allow agents in a team to anticipate the information needs of teammates and help them with their information needs proactively and effectively. In this paper, we extend CAST with a decision-making module. Through two sets of experiments in a simulated battlefield, we evaluate the effectiveness of the decision-theoretic proactive communication strategy in improving team performance, and the effectiveness of information fusion as an approach to alleviating the information overload problem faced by distributed decision makers.