The original formulation of SharedPlans (Grosz and Sidner, 1990a) was developed to provide a model of collaborative planning in which it was not necessary for one agent to have intentions-to toward an act of a different agent. Unlike other contemporaneous approaches (Searle, 1990), this formulation provided for two agents to coordinate their activities without introducing any notion of irreducible joint intentions. However, it only treated activities that directly decomposed into single-agent actions, did not address the need for agents to commit to their joint activity, and did not adequately deal with agents having only partial knowledge of the way in which to perform an action. This paper provides a revised and expanded version of SharedPlans that addresses these shortcomings. It also reformulates Pollack's definition of individual plans (Pollack, 1990) to handle cases in which a single agent has only partial knowledge; this reformulation meshes with the definition of Shar...

One reason why Distributed AI (DAI) technology has been deployed in relatively few real-size applications is that it lacks a clear and implementable model of cooperative problem solving which specifies how agents should operate and interact in complex, dynamic and unpredictable environments. As a consequence of the experience gained whilst building a number of DAI systems for industrial applications, a new principled model of cooperation has been developed. This model, called Joint Responsibility, has the notion of joint intentions at its core. It specifies pre-conditions which must be attained before collaboration can commence and prescribes how individuals should behave both when joint activity is progressing satisfactorily and also when it runs into difficulty. The theoretical model has been used to guide the implementation of a general-purpose cooperation framework and the qualitative and quantitative benefits of this implementation have been assessed through a series of comparativ...

The Functionally-Accurate, Cooperative (FA/C) paradigm provides a model for task decomposition and agent interaction in a distributed problem-solving system. In this model, agents need not have all the necessary information locally to solve their subproblems, and agents interact through the asynchronous, co-routine exchange of partial results. This model leads to the possibility that agents may behave in an uncoordinated manner. This paper traces the development of a series of increasingly sophisticated cooperative control mechanisms for coordinating agents. They include integrating data- and goal-directed control, using static meta-level information specified by an organizational structure, and using dynamic meta-level information developed in partial global planning. The framework of distributed search motivates these developments. Major themes of this work are the importance of sophisticated local control, the interplay between local control and cooperative control, and the use of s...

This paper describes a novel knowledge-based approach for helping business process designers and participants better manage exceptions (deviations from an ideal sequence of events caused by design errors, resource failures, requirement changes etc.) that can occur during the enactment of a process. This approach is based on exploiting a generic and reusable body of knowledge describing what kinds of exceptions can occur in collaborative work processes, how these exceptions can be detected, and how they can be resolved. This work builds upon previous efforts from the MIT Process Handbook project and from research on conflict management in collaborative design.

This paper presents a high-level framework for analysing and designing intelligent agents. The framework's key abstraction mechanism is a new computer level called the Social Level. The Social Level sits immediately above the Knowledge Level, as defined by Allen Newell, and is concerned with the inherently social aspects of multiple agent systems. To illustrate the working of this framework, an important new class of agent is identified and then specified. Socially responsible agents retain their local autonomy but still draw from, and provide resources to, the larger community. Through empirical evaluation, it is shown that such agents produce both good system-wide performance and good individual performance. 1. INTRODUCTION The number of multi-agent systems being designed and built is rapidly increasing as software agents gain acceptance as a powerful and useful technology for solving complex problems (Chaib-draa, 1995; Jennings, 1994; PAAM, 1996). As applications become more comple...

A critical challenge to creating effective agent-based systems is allowing them to operate effectively when the operating environment is complex, dynamic, and error-prone. In this paper we will review the limitations of current "agent-local" approaches to exception handling in agent systems, and propose an alternative approach based on a shared exception handling service that is "plugged", with little or no customization, into existing agent systems. This service can be viewed as a kind of "coordination doctor; it knows about the different ways multi-agent systems can get "sick", actively looks system-wide for symptoms of such illnesses, and prescribes specific interventions instantiated for this particular context from a body of general treatment procedures. Agents need only implement their normative behavior plus a minimal set of interfaces. We claim that this approach offers simplified agent development as well as more effective and easier to modify exception handling behavior.

Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI) systems in which multiple problem solving agents cooperate to achieve a common objective is a rapidly emerging and promising technology. However, as yet, there have been relatively few reported cases of such systems being employed to tackle real-world problems in realistic domains. One of the reasons for this is that DAI researchers have given virtually no consideration to the process of incorporating pre-existing systems into a community of cooperating agents. Yet reuse is a primary consideration for any organisation with a large software base. To redress the balance, this paper reports on an experiment undertaken at the CERN laboratories in which two pre-existing and standalone expert systems for diagnosing faults in a particle accelerator were transformed into a community of cooperating agents. The experiences and insights gained during this process provide a valuable first step towards satisfying the needs of potential users of DAI technolo...

Potentially one of the most significant opportunities for enterprise integration is the recent development and advancement of agent based systems. However, before agents can be used as generic building blocks, a methodology must be established for the development of these systems. This methodology must encompass modelling, design, and implementation of the systems. This paper outlines a methodology for the software engineering of agent based systems. The methodology is based upon the IDEF (ICAM Definition) approach for workflow modelling and analysis, the CIMOSA enterprise modelling framework, and the use case driven approach to object oriented software engineering. The methodology is illustrated via a case study in the area of discrete parts manufacturing. 1.0 INTRODUCTION Potentially one of the most significant opportunities for enterprise integration is the recent advancement of agent based systems. Numerous examples can be found in the literature of applications of agent based sy...

. A critical challenge to creating effective multi-agent systems is allowing them to operate effectively in environments where failures (`exceptions') can occur. This paper describes the motivation, progress and plans for work being pursued in this area by the MIT Adaptive Systems and Evolutionary Software research group (http://ccs.mit.edu/ases/). 1. The Challenge: Enabling Robust Open Multi-Agent Systems "open systems ... represent arguably the most important application for multiagent systems" (Wooldridge, Jennings et al. 1999) This paper addresses one simple question: how can we develop effective multi-agent systems out of the diverse and unreliable (buggy, malicious, or simply "dumb") agents and infrastructures we can expect to encounter in open system contexts? This is becoming an increasingly critical question because of emerging changes in the way human organizations work. Globalization, enabled by ubiquitous telecommunications, has increasingly required that organizations ...

In our research, we explore the role of negotiation for conflict resolution in distributed search among heterogeneous and reusable agents. We present negotiated search, an algorithm that explicitly recognizes and exploits conflict to direct search activity across a set of agents. In negotiated search, loosely coupled agents interleave the tasks of 1) local search for a solution to some subproblem; 2) integration of local subproblem solutions into a shared solution; 3) information exchange to define and refine the shared search space of the agents; and 4) assessment and reassessment of emerging solutions. Negotiated search is applicable to diverse application areas and problem-solving environments. It requires only basic search operators and allows maximum flexibility in the distribution of those operators. These qualities make the algorithm particularly appropriate for the integration of heterogeneous agents into application systems. The algorithm is implemented in a multi-agent framew...