Towards Social Comparison for Failure Detection

Abstract Social comparison, the process in which individuals compare their behavior and beliefs to those of other agents, is an important process in human societies. Our aim is to utilize theories of this process for synthetic agents, for the purposes of enabling social skills, teamcoordination, and greater individual agent performance. Our current focus is on individual failure detection and recovery in multi-agent settings. We present a novel approach, SOCFAD, inspired by Social Comparison Theory from social psychology. SOCFAD includes the following key novel concepts: (a) utilizing other agents the environment as information sources for failure detection, and (b) a detection and recovery method for previously undetectable failures using abductive inference based on other agents' beliefs 1

Recording Rationale in <I-N-C-A> for Plan Analysis

The University of Edinburgh and research sponsors are authorised to reproduce and distribute reprints and on-line copies for their purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation hereon. The views and conclusions contained herein are the author’s and shouldn’t be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of other parties.The aim of this paper is to show how the rationale behind a plan can be recorded in the plan itself. The model which underlies the I-X framework will be described in detail, focussing on annotations. It is there that a planner can record the justifications for including components into the plan. Recording rationale information of this type can be used for a number of purposes in the life cycle of a plan, including plan indexing and retrieval, failure recovery, plan explanation and establishing trust as explained in this paper

Synthesizing Protection Monitors from Causal Structure

Protection monitors synthesized from plan causal structure provide execution systems with information necessary to detect potential failures early during execution. By detecting early, the execution system is able to address these problems and keep the execution on track. When the execution system nds that the necessary repairs are beyond its capabilities, early detection gives the planning system additional time to suggest a repair. This paper discusses how protection monitors are synthesized directly from plan causal structure, and the options which are available to an execution system when protection violations occur