A decision-theoretic approach for designing proactive communication in multi-agent teamwork

  • Authors:

  • Yu Zhang;Richard A. Volz;Thomas R. loerger;John Yen

  • Affiliations:

  • Texas A&M University, College Station, TX;Texas A&M University, College Station, TX;The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA;The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2004 ACM symposium on Applied computing
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

Techniques that support effective communication during teamwork processes are of particular importance. Psychological study shows that an effective team often can anticipate information exchange among the team and communicate relevant information proactively. Proactive communication is crucial for understanding and sharing common goals and for cooperative actions. Communication can be valuable if it assists agents with new and timely information; it also has cost because it consumes network resources such as bandwidth. To address these issues, we present a new model that uses information production and need to capture the complex multi-agent communication process and a dynamic decision-theoretic determination of communication strategies. We also introduce a generic utility function and an algorithm, DTPC (Decision-Theoretic Proactive Communication), that focuses on representing information production and need of team members and resolving decision interactions among them for making decisions.