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Abstract : |
People often act together with a shared purpose; they collaborate on a group action or activity. An increasing number of computer applications also require collaboration among various systems and users. The plans for such collaborative activities must be formed with others, not in isolation. Groups may persist over long periods of time (as do orchestras, sports teams, and systems administration groups), form spontaneously for a single group activity (as when a group forms for a programming project), or come together repeatedly (as do surgical teams and airline crews). A major challenge for researchers in Artificial Intelligence is to determine ways to construct computer systems that are able to act effectively as collaborative team members. Collaborative activities require more than the sum of individual plans. Participants must form commitments not only to the group action itself, but also to the activities of other participants that are in service of this group activity. Group decision-making processes are required to expand partial plans to more complete ones. Furthermore, when conflicts arise from resource bounds, participants must weigh commitments to group activities against those for individual activities. This article briefly reviews the major features of one model of collaborative planning, SharedPlans (Grosz and Kraus, 1996, 1999), describes several current efforts to, |
