Planning and Acting Together

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 develop collaborative planning agents and systems for human–computer communication based on this model, and discusses empirical research aimed at determining commitment strategies in the SharedPlans context. This research has been supported in part by National Science Foundation grants IRI 95-25915, IRI-9618848 and CDA-9401024. The authors thank David Sullivan for his helpful comments on earlier drafts and for his assistance with the section on empirical studies.