Intention Reconciliation by Collaborative Agents

Research on resource-bounded agents has established that rational agents need to be able to revise their commitments in the light of new opportunities. In the context of collaborative activities, rational agents must be able to reconcile their intentions to do team-related actions with other, conflicting intentions. The SPIRE experimental system allows the process of intention reconciliation in team contexts to be simulated and studied. Prior work with SPIRE examined the effect of team norms, environmental factors, and agent utility functions on individual and group outcomes for homogeneous groups of agents. This paper extends these results to situations involving heterogeneous groups in which agents use different utility functions. The paper provides new illustrations of the ways in which SPIRE can reveal unpredicted interactions among the variables involved, and it suggests preliminary principles for designers of collaborative agents.