Abstract
This paper considers the design of agent strategies for deciding whether to help other members of a group with whom an agent is engaged in a collaborative activity. Three characteristics of collaborative planning must be addressed by these decision-making strategies: agents may have only partial information about their partners' plans for sub-tasks of the collaborative activity; the effectiveness of helping may not be known a priori; and, helping actions have some associated cost. The paper proposes a novel probabilistic representation of other agents' beliefs about the recipes selected for their own or for the group activity, given partial information. This representation is compact, and thus makes reasoning about helpful behavior tractable. The paper presents a decision-theoretic mechanism that uses this representation to make decisions about two kinds of helpful actions: communicating information relevant to a partner's plans for some sub-action, and adding domain actions that are helpful to other agent(s) into the collaborative plan. This mechanism includes a set of rules for reasoning about the utility of helpful actions and the cost incurred by doing them. It was tested using a multi-agent test-bed with configurations that varied agents' uncertainty about the world, their uncertainty about each others' capabilities or resources, and the cost of helpful behavior. In all cases, agents using the decision-theoretic mechanism to decide whether to help outperformed agents using purely axiomatic rules.
Original language | English |
---|---|
Title of host publication | Proceedings of The 8th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems |
Place of Publication | Budapest, Hungary |
Publisher | ACM |
Pages | 875-882 |
Number of pages | 8 |
ISBN (Print) | 978-0-9817381-7-8 |
Publication status | Published - 10 May 2009 |
Event | 8th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems - Budapest, Hungary Duration: 10 May 2009 → 15 May 2009 http://www.conferences.hu/AAMAS2009/ |
Conference
Conference | 8th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems |
---|---|
Abbreviated title | AAMAS 2009 |
Country/Territory | Hungary |
City | Budapest |
Period | 10/05/09 → 15/05/09 |
Internet address |