Collective Motivational Attitudes in Cooperative Problem Solving

In this paper we investigate the role of collective commitments in groups of agents involved in Cooperative Problem Solving (CPS). Collective intentions and collective commitmens are formalized in the logical framework designed by Rao and Georgee in 22]. The novelty of our approach is to base a collective commitment on a social plan, and deening it in terms of collective intentions and pairwise social commitments between team members together with mutual beliefs about them. During social plan execution collective commitment within a group inevitably leads to the execution of agent-speciic actions. However, due to the dynamic and possibly unpredictable environment, team members may fail their actions or be presented with new opportunities. Thus, it is necessary for them to monitor action performance and replan based on the present situation. This leads to the reconnguration problem. In order to solve this problem, the main phases of CPS, namely construction, maintenance, and realization of collective commitments, are assigned to a four-level abstract architecture. In terms of these generic levels and their interplay reconngu-ration algorithm is speciied.