Agent-enhanced Collaborative Activity in Organized Settings

For groups of agents to act collaboratively, they need to recognize the need for collaboration, decide on the method to be followed for achieving goal states, assign responsibilities to subgroups and individuals, and so on, until responsibilities that can be fulfilled by individuals are reached. Aiming to support collaborative activity of humans within organized settings, this paper introduces a set of constructs for specifying organizational structures and introduces an explicit representation of individual and collaborative responsibilities within organizations. We conjecture that group members create common awareness towards recognizing the need for collaboration by forming group acceptances. Acceptances are formed by means of shared practices and beliefs of individual agents. The paper introduces state recognition recipes that drive group members within organizations to form acceptances, and thoroughly explains the exploitation of these recipes in conjunction to state achievement recipes for achieving goal states and fulfilling responsibilities collaboratively.