This research is funded under the Special Initiative on Coordination Theory and Collaboration Technology. This is one of eleven winners under that competition. This research is directed towards integrating concepts from artificial intelligence, organization theory, and operations research into a single framework. The research argument is that the plans, organizations, and schedules studies in these separate fields can share a common representation, and are simply different abstractions of a behavioral specification. The PI develops a hierarchical, multi-dimensional specification for behavior that subsumes traditional goal, plan, functional and product hierarchies. the research outlines a protocol for coordination based on the behavioral specification, where intelligent agents incrementally exchange behavioral information and search through alternative behaviors to resolve conflicts and promote cooperation. The research also implements and evaluates this framework both in the context of cooperative robotics domain, and in the context of an intelligent systems for scheduling meetings between people. The objective is to generate scientific and technological advances using a novel, interdisciplinary approach to coordination.
