A coordination framework for a community of over-helping agents

Abstract

We consider a community of heterogeneous agents that interact by handling objects in shared repositories. Such situations may for instance arise in groupware applications. Agents involved in such systems may be humans or software agents encapsulating specific tools, interfacing with users, assisting the groupware activities etc. Over-help is an important issue in those systems, since users may have incomplete knowledge on how to solve their specific tasks, or even incomplete knowledge on what they need. We introduce in this article our approach for achieving over-help in our target class of multi-agent system and propose a new coordination framework to tackle specific issues related to this approach.