OBSERVATION-BASED PROACTIVE COMMUNICATION IN MULTI-AGENT TEAMWORK

Abstra t. Multi-agent teamwork is governed by the same prin iples that underlie human ooperation. This paper des ribes how to give agents the same ooperative apabilities, observability and proa tivity, that humans use. We show how agents an use observation of the environment and of teammates ' a tions to estimate the teammates ' beliefs without generating unne essary messages; we also show how agents an anti ipate information needs among the team members and proa tively ommuni ate the information, redu ing the total volume of ommuni ation. Finally, we present several experiments that validate the system developed, explore the ee tiveness of dierent aspe ts of observability and introdu e the s alability of the use of observability with respe t to the number of agents in a system. Key words. Multi-agent systems, teamwork, agent ommuni ation, observability 1. Introdu tion. Re ently, the fo us of mu h resear h on multi-agent systems (MAS) has shifted from strong agen y [26 ℄ to teamwork, whi h is a ooperative eort by a team of agents to a hieve a ommon or shared goal [23℄. Resear h on multi-agent teamwork builds on ndings about ee tive human team behaviors and in orporates them into intelligent agent te hnologies. For example, the shared mental model, one of the major aspe ts of the psy hologi al underpinnings of teamwork, has been adopted widely as a on eptual basis of multi-agent teamwork. Based on the shared mental model, an ee tive team often an anti ipate the information needs of teammates and oer pertinent information proa tively [18, 22℄. Consequently, supporting proa tiv