A decision-theoretic approach to resourcing plans in joint missions

In joint missions, coalition members are often guided by the social characteristics (e.g policies/norms) of the nations or organisations they represent. Developing and resourcing plans in such collaborative context is a complex problem, and requires an understanding of the policy and resource availability constraints under which others operate. We present a novel combination of argumentation, machine learning and decision theory for deciding who to talk to, and what information needs to be revealed to convince others during collaborative activities. In a set of experiments, we demonstrate that coalition members can improve their resourcing strategies and performance while reducing communication overhead by building accurate models of others’ policies and resource availabilities, and using heuristics based on decision theory.