Communications for Agent-based Human Team Support
Abstract
This chapter discusses the problem of agent aiding of ad hoc, decentralized human teams so as to improve team performance on time-stressed group tasks. To see how human teams rise to the challenge, we analyze the communication patterns of teams performing a collaborative search task that recreates some of the cognitive difficulties faced by teams during search and rescue operations. Our experiments show that the communication patterns of successful decentralized ad hoc teams performing a version of the task that requires tight coordination differ both from the teams that are less successful at task completion and from teams performing a loosely coupled version of the same task. We conclude by discussing: (1) what lessons can be derived, from observing humans, to facilitate the development of agents to support ad hoc, decentralized teams, and (2) where can intelligent agents be inserted into human teams to improve the humans' performance.
BibTeX
@incollection{Sukthankar-2009-10167,author = {Gita Sukthankar and Katia Sycara and Joseph Andrew Giampapa and Christopher Burnett},
title = {Communications for Agent-based Human Team Support},
booktitle = {Handbook of Research on Multi-Agent Systems: Semantics and Dynamics of Organizational Models},
publisher = {IGI-Global (http://www.igi-pub.com/) Handbook of Research, Information Science Reference},
address = {Hershey, Pennsylvania, U.S.A.},
chapter = {12},
editor = {Virginia Dignum},
year = {2009},
month = {February},
pages = {285 - 313},
keywords = {ad-hoc decentralized human-agent teams, agent members of human teams},
}