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Journal ArticleDOI

Building common awareness in agent organizations

TL;DR: The paper introduces state recognition recipes that drive groups within organizations to create common awareness, explains the exploitation of these recipes and presents an example that shows the potential of the approach.
Abstract: Groups of collaborative agents need to have a single view of the world to act as single entities. Building common awareness in agent groups involves reconciling different views of the world and deciding a single view that every agent within the group accepts. The notion of collective belief has been used extensively in formal models for collaborative activity to deal with group awareness. However, collective belief alone is not sufficient for organized groups to act as single entities. In human organizations, members of groups accept that certain states hold based on shared group practices/policies and beliefs of individual agents. These acceptances are formed even if some members of the group do not believe that the corresponding states hold. This paper distinguishes between individual beliefs and group acceptances in multi-agent systems in well-organized settings. It introduces state recognition recipes that drive groups within organizations to create common awareness, explains the exploitation of these recipes and presents an example that shows the potential of the approach.
Citations
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Book ChapterDOI
TL;DR: The notion of mutual or collective belief is not appropriate in organized settings where group members exploit shared policies to accept that certain states hold, even if some members of the group do not believe them.
Abstract: Groups of collaborative agents need to create group beliefs (acceptances) in order to act as a single entity. The notion of mutual or collective belief, which has been used extensively to cope with group belief, is not appropriate in organized settings where group members exploit shared policies to accept that certain states hold, even if some members of the group do not believe them. This paper distinguishes between beliefs and acceptances, introduces policies for acceptances, and investigates communication requirements towards forming acceptances.

2 citations


Cites methods from "Building common awareness in agent ..."

  • ...Currently, we have implemented a prototype system in which agents can reason about and pursue their responsibilities and we are also experimenting with different algorithms for creating acceptances and for pursuing responsibilities [5, 6]....

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Journal Article
TL;DR: A generic design pattern for building agent organizations in which the constituting groups build and maintain their own group goals and beliefs according to their needs and the environmental conditions is proposed.
Abstract: Recently there is an increased interest in social agency and in designing and building agent organizations. In this paper we view an organization as a set of interrelated groups. Each group has an explicit structure in terms of positions and their interrelations. Agents in groups deliberate socially, distinguishing between their individual and group attitudes: Each agent is able to agree on and accept certain attitudes as attitudes of the groups it belongs. Acting as group member, an agent must be able to act on the basis of these group mental attitudes rather than on the basis of its individual beliefs and goals. This issue, although ultimately important, it has not given much attention in agent community. The objective of this paper is (a) to propose a generic design pattern for building agent organizations in which the constituting groups build and maintain their own group goals and beliefs according to their needs and the environmental conditions, (b) to present the functionality of social deliberating agents that act as group members in organized settings, and (c) to report on the development of a prototype system that comprises agents that implement such a kind of social deliberation.

1 citations


Cites background or methods from "Building common awareness in agent ..."

  • ...A more detailed description of the model can be found in [12]....

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  • ...In [12] we present specific algorithms for the formation of acceptances that are based on the concept of contribution of a group member towards the acceptance of a...

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Proceedings ArticleDOI
25 Jul 2005
TL;DR: The notion of collective belief is not appropriate in organized settings where group members accept that certain states hold based on shared practices, even if some of the group do not believe that these states hold.
Abstract: Groups of collaborative agents within organizations need to create group awareness in order to act as a single entity. The notion of collective belief, which has been used extensively to cope with group awareness, is not appropriate in organized settings where group members accept that certain states hold based on shared practices, even if some members of the group do not believe that these states hold. This paper distinguishes between individual beliefs and group acceptances and introduces state recognition recipes that drive groups within organizations to create common awareness.

1 citations


Cites background from "Building common awareness in agent ..."

  • ...This paper distinguishes between acceptances and beliefs [7, 5, 1], and proposes state recognition recipes for the representation of group policies towards forming group acceptances [ 4 ]....

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Book ChapterDOI
26 Oct 2005
TL;DR: In this article, the authors propose a generic design pattern for building agent organizations in which the constituting groups build and maintain their own group goals and beliefs according to their needs and the environmental conditions.
Abstract: Recently there is an increased interest in social agency and in designing and building agent organizations. In this paper we view an organization as a set of interrelated groups. Each group has an explicit structure in terms of positions and their interrelations. Agents in groups deliberate socially, distinguishing between their individual and group attitudes: Each agent is able to agree on and accept certain attitudes as attitudes of the groups it belongs. Acting as group member, an agent must be able to act on the basis of these group mental attitudes rather than on the basis of its individual beliefs and goals. This issue, although ultimately important, it has not given much attention in agent community. The objective of this paper is (a) to propose a generic design pattern for building agent organizations in which the constituting groups build and maintain their own group goals and beliefs according to their needs and the environmental conditions, (b) to present the functionality of social deliberating agents that act as group members in organized settings, and (c) to report on the development of a prototype system that comprises agents that implement such a kind of social deliberation.
References
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Book
01 Jan 1995
TL;DR: In "The Construction of Social Reality", eminent philosopher John Searle examines the structure of social reality (or those portions of the world that are facts only by human agreement, such as money, marriage, property, and government), and contrasts it to a brute reality that is independent of human agreement as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: This short treatise looks at how we construct a social reality from our sense impressions; at how, for example, we construct a five-pound note with all that implies in terms of value and social meaning, from the printed piece of paper we see and touch. In "The Construction of Social Reality," eminent philosopher John Searle examines the structure of social reality (or those portions of the world that are facts only by human agreement, such as money, marriage, property, and government), and contrasts it to a brute reality that is independent of human agreement. Searle shows that brute reality provides the indisputable foundation for all social reality, and that social reality, while very real, is maintained by nothing more than custom and habit."

4,989 citations


"Building common awareness in agent ..." refers methods in this paper

  • ...In this paper, in order to overcome the difficulties that arise when building a common view in a well-organized setting, we adopt a non-summative account of group belief [8,9,26,32]....

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Book
14 Aug 1995
TL;DR: Reasoning About Knowledge is the first book to provide a general discussion of approaches to reasoning about knowledge and its applications to distributed systems, artificial intelligence, and game theory.
Abstract: A model for knowledge and its properties completeness and complexity - results and techniques knowledge in distributed systems actions and protocols common knowledge, co-ordination and agreement evolving knowledge dealing with logical omniscience knowledge and computation common knowledge revisited.

4,318 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: A revised and expanded version of SharedPlans that reformulates Pollack's (1990) definition of individual plans to handle cases in which a single agent has only partial knowledge and has the features required by Bratman's (1992) account of shared cooperative activity.

1,112 citations


"Building common awareness in agent ..." refers methods in this paper

  • ...There are several generic models for collaborative activity, like the SHARED-PLANS model [10,11], the JOINT INTENTIONS model [2], the JOINT...

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Posted Content
TL;DR: In STEAM, team members monitor the team's and individual members' performance, reorganizing the team as necessary, and decision-theoretic communication selectivity in STEAM ensures reduction in communication overheads of teamwork, with appropriate sensitivity to the environmental conditions.
Abstract: Many AI researchers are today striving to build agent teams for complex, dynamic multi-agent domains, with intended applications in arenas such as education, training, entertainment, information integration, and collective robotics. Unfortunately, uncertainties in these complex, dynamic domains obstruct coherent teamwork. In particular, team members often encounter differing, incomplete, and possibly inconsistent views of their environment. Furthermore, team members can unexpectedly fail in fulfilling responsibilities or discover unexpected opportunities. Highly flexible coordination and communication is key in addressing such uncertainties. Simply fitting individual agents with precomputed coordination plans will not do, for their inflexibility can cause severe failures in teamwork, and their domain-specificity hinders reusability. Our central hypothesis is that the key to such flexibility and reusability is providing agents with general models of teamwork. Agents exploit such models to autonomously reason about coordination and communication, providing requisite flexibility. Furthermore, the models enable reuse across domains, both saving implementation effort and enforcing consistency. This article presents one general, implemented model of teamwork, called STEAM. The basic building block of teamwork in STEAM is joint intentions (Cohen & Levesque, 1991b); teamwork in STEAM is based on agents' building up a (partial) hierarchy of joint intentions (this hierarchy is seen to parallel Grosz & Kraus's partial SharedPlans, 1996). Furthermore, in STEAM, team members monitor the team's and individual members' performance, reorganizing the team as necessary. Finally, decision-theoretic communication selectivity in STEAM ensures reduction in communication overheads of teamwork, with appropriate sensitivity to the environmental conditions. This article describes STEAM's application in three different complex domains, and presents detailed empirical results.

966 citations


"Building common awareness in agent ..." refers methods in this paper

  • ...Furthermore, there are several implementations that are based on these models, like STEAM [30], GRATE* [15], and the ICAGENT framework [18]....

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