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Abstract

This paper describes a prototype in which a conversational case-based reasoner, NaCoDAE, was agentified and inserted in the RETSINA multi-agent system. Its task was to determine agent roles within a heterogeneous society of agents, where the agents may use capability-based or team-oriented agent coordination strategies. There were three reasons for assigning this task to NaCoDAE: (1) to relieve the agents of the overhead of determining, for themselves, if they should be involved in the task, or not; (2) to convert seemingly unrelated data into contextually relevant knowledge --- as a case-based reasoning system, NaCoDAE is particularly suited for applying apparently incoherent data to a wide variety of domain-specific situations; and (3) as a conversational CBR system, to both unobtrusively listen to human statements and to proactively dialogue with other agents in a more goal-directed approach to gathering relevant information. The cases maintained by NaCoDAE have question and answer components, which were originally intended to maintain the textual representations of questions and answers for humans. By associating agent capability descriptions and queries with the case questions, NaCoDAE also assumed the team role of a capability-based coordinator. By encoding fragments of HTN plan objectives in its case actions, we were able to convert NaCoDAE into a conversational case-based planner that served compositionally-generated HTN plan objectives, already populated with situation-relevant knowledge, for use by the RETSINA team-oriented agents.

Keywords

conversational case-based planning, agents, team coordination, RETSINA, multi-agent systems, NaCoDAE

Notes

Grant ID: Berlin Heidelberg

Associated Center(s) / Consortia: Center for Integrated Manfacturing Decision Systems

Associated Lab(s) / Group(s): Advanced Agent - Robotics Technology Lab

Associated Project(s): Reusable Environment for Task Structured Intelligent Network Agents, Pleiades, Agent Storm

Number of pages: 15

Text Reference

Joseph Andrew Giampapa and Katia Sycara, "Conversational Case-Based Planning for Agent Team Coordination," Case-Based Reasoning Research and Development: Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Case-Based Reasoning, ICCBR 2001, July, 2001, pp. 189--203.

BibTeX Reference

@inproceedings{Giampapa_2001_3775,
   author = "Joseph Andrew Giampapa and Katia Sycara",
   editor = "David W. Aha and Ian Watson (editors)",
   title = "Conversational Case-Based Planning for Agent Team Coordination",
   booktitle = "Case-Based Reasoning Research and Development: Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Case-Based Reasoning, ICCBR 2001",
   pages = "189--203",
   publisher = "Springer-Verlag",
   address = "Berlin Heidelberg",
   month = "July",
   year = "2001",
   volume = "2080",
}

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