Barriers to Robust and Effective Human-Agent Teamwork

Building a robust and effective human-agent team is difficult, as teams can fail for many reasons. In this study, we investigated the performance of human-agent teams with divisional and functional team structure under different level of task load uncertainty. Divisional teams show robustness against uncertainly but can lead to poorer performance. Three reasons related to team coordination were identified for the poor performance, namely duplicate work, underutilization of resources and infrequent communication. We proposed a conceptual model to explain the mechanism of team coordination. In future studies, we hope to quantify this team coordination model, connect it with team performance, and test the effect of different solutions using the model.