Collaborative Plans for Group Activities

Abstract

The original formulation of SharedPlans [Grosz and Sidner, 1990] was developed to provide a model of collaborative planning in which it was not necessary for one agent to have intentions toward an act of a different agent. This formulation provided for two agents to coordinate their activities without introducing any notion of jointly held intentions (or , ' weintentions') . However, it only treated activities that directly decomposed into single agents actions. In this paper we provide a revised and expanded version of SharedPlans that accommodates actions involving groups of agents as well as complex actions that decompose into multi-agent actions. The new definitions also allow for contracting out certain actions, and provide a model with the features required in Bratman's account of shared cooperative activity [Bratman, 1992]. A reformulation of the model of individual plans that meshes with the definition of SharedPlans is also provided .