Awareness as a vital ingredient of teamwork

For successful coordination and cooperation in a multiagent system, participants need to establish a sufficiently accurate awareness of the current situation. Awareness is understood here as a limited form of consciousness: in the minimal form, it refers to the state of an agent's beliefs about itself, about others and about the environment. When considered in the context of agents' mental states, this leads to distinguishing three levels of awareness: intra-personal (about the agent itself), inter-personal (about other agents as individuals), and group awareness. Problems in modeling agents' awareness on all three levels are analyzed. It turns out that both the communication medium and agents' cognitive and computational limitations make the achievement of awareness difficult. Cognitive science is used to analyze and explain problems in human awareness, based on the concept of bounded rationality. The BDI framework, originally designed to formally define agents�...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: ATAL
• Authors: Barbara Dunin-Keplicz, Rineke Verbrugge
• Keywords: ATAL 2006, Awareness, Cognitive Science, Intelligent Agents, Motivational Attitudes