Collaborative Plans for Complex Group Action

Abstract

The original formulation of SharedPlans by B. Grosz and C. Sidner (1990) was developed to provide a model of collaborative planning in which it was not necessary for one agent to have intentions-to toward an act of a different agent. Unlike other contemporaneous approaches (J.R. Searle, 1990), this formulation provided for two agents to coordinate their activities without introducing any notion of irreducible joint intentions. However, it only treated activities that directly decomposed into single-agent actions, did not address the need for agents to commit to their joint activity, and did not adequately deal with agents having only partial knowledge of the way in which to perform an action. This paper provides a revised and expanded version of SharedPlans that addresses these shortcomings. It also reformulates Pollack's (1990) definition of individual plans to handle cases in which a single agent has only partial knowledge; this reformulation meshes with the definition of SharedPlans. The new definitions also allow for contracting out certain actions. The formalization that results has the features required by Bratman's (1992) account of shared cooperative activity and is more general than alternative accounts (H. Levesque et al., 1990; E. Sonenberg et al., 1992).