Handling Unanticipated Events During Collaboration

Abstract

Handling unanticipated events during problem solving is diicult enough when an agent is operating by itself. When the agent is part of a cooperative distributed problem solving (CDPS) system, the task's diiculty increases dramatically. Now the agent is forced to consider the eeect of the event not only on itself, but also on others and the group as a whole. It must also consider who should handle the event and the likely impact that actions taken to diagnose the event or respond to it may have on other agents. In this paper, we discuss preliminary work aimed at developing a process for handling events during multiagent cooperative problem solving. The domain in which the work is being done is cooperating multiple autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). However, the approach should have broader applicability to almost any real-world cooperative problem solving task involving autonomous or nearly autonomous agents.