Collaborative Planning

Title: Agent-based Collaborative Planning

Sponsor: Army Research Office and Army Research Lab

          The goal of this project is to develop intelligent agent technology that helps a distributed mobile TOC (Tactical Operation Center) to collaborate for mission analysis by integrating a graphical display and a text-based collaborative planning tool in an intelligent way. At least two kinds of intelligent agents will be included in the proposed framework: (1) staff assistant agents and (2) team support agents. A staff assistant agent alerts a staff officer regarding events or messages they should pay attention to. Such alert will be generated based on a given context, which includes the roles of the officer as well as the situations of the battle space. A team support agent monitors the collaboration process to identify missing or incomplete steps and to suggest actions for the team to consider.

          Both types of agents will utilize knowledge about the structure and the process of the mission analysis team, as well as impacts of a team member's actions on the function of other staff officers. The proposed project will be lead by Dr. John Yen. The project will gain leverage from Dr. Yen's previous and ongoing research in developing team-based agents. In particular, his current research supported by an AFOSR MURI grant has developed a multi-agent architecture called CAST (Collaborative Agents Simulating Teamwork), which will provide key foundations to the proposed agent-based collaborative planning research. The proposed project will also utilize expertise and relevant agent technologies developed under the "Tactical Intelligent Agent" project, supported by Army Research Laboratory from 2000 to 2001.