When rational, utility-maximizing agents encounter an opportunity to collaborate on a group activity, they must determine whether to commit to that activity. We refer to this problem as the initial-commitment decision problem (ICDP). This paper describes a mechanism that agents may use to solve the ICDP. The mechanism is based on a combinatorial auction in which agents bid on sets of roles in t...

An agent's ability to understand an utterance depends upon its ability to relate that utterance to the preceding discourse. The agent must determine whether the utterance begins a new segment of the discourse, completes the current segment, or contributes to it. The intentional structure of the discourse, comprised of discourse segment purposes and their interrelationships, plays a central role...

This paper addresses existing functional needs and current technical opportunities for intelligent automation to support air campaign and theater level planning. In the context of a changing political, military, and acquisition environment, we describe several advanced automation activities that address key shortfalls in situation assessment, force planning, and legacy systems integration. Firs...

Autonomous, elementary units of production, co-operating in temporary networks, are considered as a key organisational form of enterprises in the 21st century. A scientific approach is provided by networks based on customeroriented, directly linked, smallest autonomous business units called Competence Cells. This approach leads to new requirements for the planning of production systems of such ...

This paper considers the design of agent strategies for deciding whether to help other members of a group with whom an agent is engaged in a collaborative activity. Three characteristics of collaborative planning must be addressed by these decision-making strategies: agents may have only partial information about their partners’ plans for sub-tasks of the collaborative activity; the effectivene...

Approaches to discourse understanding fall roughly into two categories: those that treat mental states as elemental and thus reason directly about them, and those that do not reason about the beliefs and intentions of agents themselves, but about the propositions and actions that might be considered objects of those beliefs and intentions. The rst type of approach is a mental phenomenon approac...

Most manufacturing companies face strong competition and continuowus changes in market and customer requirements. Planning are frequently affected by the actions of suppliers and customers in their supply networks such as changes to orders that are already in production or re-planning caused by lack of materials or resources. Often, decisions have to be made without having a complete, real time...