Maximizing Group Utilities While Avoiding Conflicts Through Agent Qualifications

Abstract

Role-based collaboration (RBC) is a role-centered computational approach designed to solve collaboration problems. Group role assignment is an essential and extensive part of this research. Based on group multirole assignment (GMRA), this article addresses some issues in the current research. First, managers often hope to obtain the highest benefits rather than maximizing the team performance, which is emphasized in the traditional RBC research. This article introduces the use of expected utility theory to assign roles in order to maximize team effectiveness. Second, the existing studies need to provide expressions of agent and role conflicts, which have yet to be reasonably addressed. This article classifies conflicts by employing agent and role capability combined with the three-way conflict analysis theory. Based on these, this article puts forward the utility-based GMRA with conflicting agent and role problems. The validity is verified through several experiments and comparative analysis, which provides more possibilities for future research.