On Proactive Delivery of Needed Information to Teammates
John Yen, Xiaocong Fan, Richard A. Volz · 2002
Psychological studies about human teamwork have shown that members of an effective team can often anticipate needs of other teammates and take appropriate actions accordingly. CAST is a teamwork model that enables agents in a team to anticipate information needs of teammates, whether they are software agents or human agents. Based on such needs, agents can choose to assist teammates through proactive communications and information delivery. In this paper, we establish the formal foundation of such proactive behavior using SharedPlan theory. We show that the proactive information delivery behavior of agents can be derived from the assist axiom in SharedPlan theory. This formal foundation of proactive information delivery behavior is critical not only for understanding the underlying assumptions required to justify the behavior but also for studying the impact of an agent's belief about other teammates' observability on the agent's choice for proactive information delivery actions.