With A Little Help From A Friend: Applying Overhearing To Teamwork

Software agents must have some degree of autonomy in order to be able to adjust to changing and sometimes unpredictable situations due to communication problems. Introducing so-called "overhearers" for monitoring team activities and helping recovery from failures seems to be a very promising approach. In this paper, we claim that having a "global" representation of the interaction protocol can be useful to monitor team communication. Moreover, using this global description of group interactions, overhearers can monitor activities without requiring a priori, precise knowledge of which and how many agents are involved. We show how, given a global description of a protocol in terms of involved roles rather than agents, it is possible for an overhearer to monitor its evolution and detect, and recover from, certain types of failures. We evaluated an implementation of the overhearer monitoring a group of agents executing a Contract-Net Protocol