Agent Support for Mission Planning Under Policy Constraints

Abstract

Mission-critical scenarios, such as military or disaster response missions, often call for the formation of coalitions, made up of people from different countries or organizations and required to adhere to certain policies. These policies define the explicit obligations, permissions and prohibitions governing members of the coalition. While planning for joint action in these scenarios is already a complex problem for human planners, it is made more difficult or even impossible under such policy constraints, especially if policy conflicts exist between them. In this paper we propose that agents could be used to support human planners in coalitions, and present our work in the area of agent support for coalition mission planning under such policy constraints. We define a taxonomy of policies and outline the different types of support that agents can provide to human planners. We describe an experimental framework within which different types of agent support can be empirically evaluated within the context of a human planning problem.