Don't cancel my Barcelona trip: Adjusting the autonomy of agent proxies in human organizations

Abstract:

Teamwork is a critical capability in multiagent environments Many such en vironments mandate that the agents and agentteams must be persistent ie exist over long periods of time Agents in such persistent teams are bound together by their longterm common interests and goals This paper focuses on exible teamwork in such persistent teams Unfortunately while previous work has investigated exible teamwork persistent teams remain unexplored For exible teamwork one promising approach that has emerged is modelbased ie providing agents with general models of teamwork that explicitly specify their commitments in teamwork Such models enable agents to autonomously reason about coordination Unfortunately for persistent teams such models may lead to coordination and communication actions that while locally optimal are highly problematic for the teams longterm goals We present a decisiontheoretic technique based on Markov decision processes to enable persistent teams to over come such limitations of the modelbased approach In particular agents reason about expected team utilities of future team states that are pro jected to result from actions recommended by the teamwork model as well as lowercost or highercost variations on these actions To accomodate realtime constraints this reasoning is done in an anytime fashion Implemented examples from an analytic search tree and some realworld domains are presented.