Agent teamwork and reorganisation: exploring self-awareness in dynamic situations

We propose attributes that are needed in sophisticated agent teams capable of working to manage an evolving disaster. Such agent teams need to be dynamically formed and ca- pable of adaptive reorganization as the demands and com- plexity of the situation evolve. The agents need to have self- awareness of their own roles, responsibilities and capabilities and be aware of their relationships with others in the team. Each agent is not only empowered to act autonomously to- ward realizing their goals, agents are also able to negotiate to change roles as a situation changes, if reorganization is required or perceived to be in the team interest. The hierar- chical 'position' of an agent and the 'relationships' between agents govern the authority and obligations that an agent adopts. Such sophisticated agents might work in a collabora- tive team with people to self-organize and manage a critical incident such as a bush-¯re. We are planning to implement a team of agents to interface with a bush-¯re simulation, working with people in real time, to test our architecture.E

Human–agent team dynamics: a review and future research opportunities

Humans teaming with intelligent autonomous agents is becoming indispensable in work environments. However, human–agent teams pose significant challenges, as team dynamics are complex arising from the task and social aspects of human–agent interactions. To improve our understanding of human–agent team dynamics, in this article, we conduct a systematic literature review. Drawing on Mathieu et al.’s (2019) teamwork model developed for all-human teams, we map the landscape of research to human–agent team dynamics, including structural features, compositional features, mediating mechanisms, and the interplay of the above features and mechanisms. We reveal that the development of human–agent team dynamics is still nascent, with a particular focus on information sharing, trust development, agents’ human likeness behaviors, shared cognitions, situation awareness, and function allocation. Gaps remain in many areas of team dynamics, such as team processes, adaptability, shared leadership, and team diversity. We offer various interdisciplinary pathways to advance research on human–agent teams

Towards Flexible Coordination of Human-Agent Teams

Enabling interactions of agent-teams and humans is a critical area of research, with encouraging progress in the past few years. However, previous work suffers from three key limitations: (i) limited human situational awareness, reducing human effectiveness in directing agent teams, (ii) the agent team's rigid interaction strategies that limit team performance, and (iii) lack of formal tools to analyze the impact of such interaction strategies. This article presents a software prototype called DEFACTO (Demonstrating Effective Flexible Agent Coordination of Teams through Omnipresence). DEFACTO is based on a software proxy architecture and 3D visualization system, which addresses the three limitations mentioned above. First, the 3D visualization interface enables human virtual omnipresence in the environment, improving human situational awareness and ability to assist agents. Second, generalizing past work on adjustable autonomy, the agent team chooses among 1 a variety of team-level interaction strategies, even excluding humans from the loop in extreme circumstances. Third, analysis tools help predict the performance of (and choose among) different interaction strategies. DEFACTO is illustrated in a future disaster response simulation scenario, and extensive experimental results are presented