Cooperation and Group Utility

A Replanning Algorithm for Decision Theoretic Hierarchical Planning: Principles and Empirical Evaluation

“…The concept underlying both works is that the speaker's behavior is directed by the desire to respect social goals, like avoiding that the interlocutor is o ended (see Brown & Levinson (1987)). Finally, the model of cooperation among agents has been re ned in Boella et al (1999), where a decision theoretic planning framework is exploited to allow an agent decide when it is worthwhile that he adopts some of the partner's goals and communicates with him to coordinate the shared activity.…”

An Architecture for Normative Reactive Agents

“…For this reason, the notation of actions has been augmented with the information about the action intended effect, which makes it possible to track the motivations why it has been included int he plan, and to identify its preconditions. 1 The task of identifying the next action whose preconditions do not hold (the 'focused action') is accomplished by the Find-focused-action function (see the main procedure in Figure 2); mark is the function which sets the current focused action of the plan). Then, starting from the focused action (FA), the replanning algorithm partializes the plan, following the derivation tree associated with the plan (see the partializes function in Figure 3).…”

“…In practice, the bearer considers the possibility that the normative agent sanctions him for violating the norm, or rewards him for respecting the norm, as prescribed in the definition of the norm itself. This process -similar to game-theoretic approaches -is carried out by means of the anticipatory planning technique illustrated in [1]. The agent computes the plans for bringing the about the normative goal, and trade them off against his current intentions from an utilitarian point of view.…”

“…The expected utility of the original plan and of the new plans is evaluated after performing the look-ahead step (which is carried out by exploiting the anticipatory planning framework), i.e. in the light of the reaction of the normative agent ( [1], [2]): as a result of the utility-based trade-off between the alternatives (preference-driven choice), the agent may commit to a plan which complies with the normative goal.…”

“…5 However, the expected utility of the original plan and of the new plans should be evaluated after performing the look-ahead step (which is carried out by exploiting the anticipatory planning framework), i.e. in the light of the reaction of the normative agent ( [1], [2]): as a result of the utility-based trade-off between the alternatives (preference-driven choice), the agent may commit to a plan which complies with the normative goal. Since the details of planning with anticipatory coordination are described elsewhere, here we will not discuss this issue: we simply assume that the utility of the plans which violates the norm is lowered as an effect of the sanction.…”