Proactive Communications in Agent Teamwork

The capabilities for agents in a team to anticipate informationneeds of teammates and proactively offer relevant information are highly desirable. However, such behaviors have not been fully prescribed by existing agent theories. To establish a theory about proactive information exchanges, we first introduces the concept of “information-needs”, then identify and formally define the intentional semantics of two proactive communicative acts, which highly depend on the speaker’s awareness of others’ information-needs. It is shown that communications using these proactive performatives can be derived as helping behaviors. Conversation policies involving these proactive performatives are also discussed. The work in this paper may serve as a guide for the specification and design of agent architectures, algorithms, and applications that support proactive communications in agent teamwork.