SharedPlans in Electronic Commerce

Abstract

Rational agents often need to work together [356]. There are jobs that cannot be done by one agent, because no one individual has sufficient competence, resources or information to solve the entire problem alone. In other situations, agents that work in the same environment may benefit from cooperation. A joint action by a team does not consist merely of simultaneous and coordinated individual actions to act together. A team must be aware of and concerned with the status of the group effort as a whole. To rectify this problem, it was proposed that agents should have a well-grounded and explicit model of cooperative problem solving on which their behavior can be based. Several such models have been proposed [375, 344, 311, 259].