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Coordinating human and computer agents

  • Agent-Based Coordination
  • Conference paper
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Coordination Technology for Collaborative Applications (ASIAN 1996)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 1364))

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Abstract

In many application areas individuals are responsible for an agenda of tasks and face choices about the best way to locally handle each task, in what order to do tasks, and when to do them. Such decisions are often hard to make because of coordination problems: individual tasks are related to the tasks of others in complex ways, and there are many sources of uncertainty (no one has a complete view of the task structure at arbitrary levels of detail, the situation may be changing dynamically, and no one is entirely sure of the outcomes of all of their actions). The focus of this paper is the development of support tools for distributed, cooperative work by groups (collaborative teams) of human and computational agents. We will discuss the design of a set of distributed autonomous computer programs (“agents”) that assist people in coordinating their activities by helping them to manage their agendas. We describe several ongoing implementations of these ideas including 1) simulated agents and tasks, 2) a real multi-agent system for financial portfolio management, and 3) a real mixed human and computational agent system for concurrent engineering design.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer and Information Sciences, University of Delaware, 19716, Newark, DE

    Keith S. Decker

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  1. Keith S. Decker
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Wolfram Conen Gustaf Neumann

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© 1998 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Decker, K.S. (1998). Coordinating human and computer agents. In: Conen, W., Neumann, G. (eds) Coordination Technology for Collaborative Applications. ASIAN 1996. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1364. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0027101

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0027101

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-64170-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-69699-5

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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