Using Annotated Guidelines to Influence the Behavior of Organizationally Adept Agents

An organizationally adept agent (OAA) adjusts its behavior when given annotated organizational guidelines. More importantly, it can also determine when such guidelines become ineffective and proactively adapt its behavior to better achieve organizational objectives. A central OAA tenet is a clear separation between operational decision making (the detailed moment-to-moment behavior decisions made by an agent) and organizational control (longer-term directives designed using estimates of environment and agent characteristics and expressed to agents as annotated guidelines that bias and inform their operational decision making). This separation enables the OAA to stop following guidelines when the estimates used in their design were incorrect or when the environment changes over time and to propose and negotiate agreements with other OAAs to replace such guidelines. We describe a fully operational OAA architecture that: 1) allows agents to operate reasonably without organizational guidelines; 2) uses belief values in operational decision making that are updated by experience and can be seeded by expectations conveyed in guideline annotations; 3) assesses the appropriateness of guidelines based on deviations from annotated estimates developed during their design; and 4) can make agreements to replace inappropriate guidelines. We present details of this approach to agent organization and analyze its effectiveness using call-center OAAs striving to extinguish fires in RoboCup Rescue scenarios.