Intention Reconcilation in the Context of Teamwork: An Initial Empirical Investigation

With growing opportunities for individually motivated agents to work collaboratively to satisfy shared goals, it becomes increasingly important to design agents that can make intelligent decisions in the context of commitments to group activities. In particular, agents need to be able to reconcile their intentions to do team-related actions with other, conflicting intentions. We present the SPIRE experimental system that allows the process of intention reconciliation in team contexts to be simulated and studied. SPIRE enables us to examine the influence of team norms and environmental factors on team members faced with conflicting intentions, as well as the effectiveness of different intention-reconciliation strategies. We discuss results from pilot experiments that confirm the reasonableness of our model of the problem and illustrate some of the issues involved, and we lay the groundwork for future experiments that will allow us to derive principles for designers of collaboration-capable agents.