Models of Plans to Support Communication: An Initial Report

Abstract

Agents collaborating to achieve a goal bring to their joint activity different beliefs about ways in which to achieve the goal and the actions necessary for doing so. Thus, a model of collaboration must provide a way of representing and distinguishing among agents’ beliefs and of stating the ways in which the intentions of different agents contribute to achieving their goal. Furthermore, in collaborative activity, collaboration occurs in the planning process itself. Thus, rather than modelling plan recognition, per se, what must be modelled is the augmentation of beliefs about the actions of multiple agents and their intentions. In this paper, we modify and expand the SharedPlan model of collaborative behavior (Grosz and Sidner 1990). We present an algorithm for updating an agent’s beliefs about a partial SharedPlan and describe an initial implementation of this algorithm in the domain of network management.