An Autonomous Software Agent for Navy Personnel Work: A Case Study

Human Interaction with Autonomous Systems in Complex Environments

Volume

Papers from the 2003 AAAI Spring Symposium

Contents

IDA is an autonomous software agent whose task is to assign a sailor to a new tour of duty at the end of the old. Her task input is most often initiated by an email from the sailor; thereafter she acts completely autonomously. The task requires IDA to access databases, to deliberate, to perform complex constraint satisfaction, and to negotiate with the sailor in natural language. IDA’s architecture and mechanisms are motivated by a variety of computational paradigms and implement a number of cognitive models including the Global Workspace Theory of consciousness. IDA is able to interact in depth with sailors in a relatively complex real-world environment involving job requirements, Navy policy, location, travel, training, dates, costs, preferences, etc. Here we briefly describe the IDA technology and her interactions as a case study of the interaction of sophisticated software agents with humans.