Building common awareness in agent organizations

Abstract

Groups of collaborative agents need to have a single view of the world to act as single entities. Building common awareness in agent groups involves reconciling different views of the world and deciding a single view that every agent within the group accepts. The notion of collective belief has been used extensively in formal models for collaborative activity to deal with group awareness. However, collective belief alone is not sufficient for organized groups to act as single entities. In human organizations, members of groups accept that certain states hold based on shared group practices/policies and beliefs of individual agents. These acceptances are formed even if some members of the group do not believe that the corresponding states hold. This paper distinguishes between individual beliefs and group acceptances in multi-agent systems in well-organized settings. It introduces state recognition recipes that drive groups within organizations to create common awareness, explains the exploitation of these recipes and presents an example that shows the potential of the approach.