Proactive Information Exchanges Based on the Awareness of Teammates’ Information Needs

The capabilities for agents in a team to anticipate information needs of teammates and proactively offer relevant information are highly desirable. However, such behaviors have not been fully prescribed by existing agent theories. We attempt to establish a theory about proactive information exchanges based on the SharedPlan framework and Cohen and Levesque’s formalization of communicative actions. We first formally specify two types of information needs. A new performative called ProInform is introduced by extending the semantics of Inform to include the speaker’s belief about the information needs of the addressee. For agents in a team containing subteams to achieve proactive information exchanges, we define the semantics of “subscribe” through the third party (e.g., a broker agent). We also show that proactive information exchanges using these communicative actions can be derived as assist behaviors from the theory. The framework not only serves as a formal specification for designing agent architectures, algorithms, and applications that support proactive information exchanges among agents in a team, but also offers opportunities for extending existing agent communication protocols to support proactive teamwork.