A Mechanism for Group Decision Making in Collaborative Activity

Book One

Volume

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 17

Agents

The SharedPlans formalization of collaboration stipulates that collaborating agents must commit to certain decision-making processes, but it does not specify those processes. This paper presents a mechanism for group decision making that may be applied to the decisions that agents involved in a SharedPlan need to make: adopting the initial commitment, selecting a recipe, assigning agents to subtasks, and identifying various action parameters. The paper thus more fully specifies the dynamic expansion of a partial SharedPlan to a more complete plan. The decision-making mechanism is represented by a fixed, fully-specified SharedPlan. A set of speech acts and conditions under which those speech acts invoke the decision-making SharedPlans are also defined. The definition of the force of declarative speech acts is based on Searle’s notion of constitutive rules.