The Evolution of Sharedplans

Rational agents often need to work together. There are jobs that cannot be done by one agent—for example, singing a duet or operating a computer network—and jobs that are more efficiently done by more than one agent—for example, hanging a door or searching the Internet. Collaborative behavior—coordinated activity in which the participants work jointly with each other to satisfy a shared goal—is more than the sum of individual acts [24, 8] and may be distinguished from both interaction and simple coordination in terms of the commitments agents make to each other [4, 10, 9]. A theory of collaboration must therefore treat not only the intentions, abilities, and knowledge about action of individual agents, but also their coordination in group planning and acting. It also must account for the ways in which plans are incrementally formed and executed by the participants.