Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The central idea, which is not new for those who study human organizations but which is sometimes forgotten by computer agent researchers, is that the design of coordination mechanisms cannot rely on the principled construction of the agents alone, but must rely on the structure and other characteristics of the task environment. Such dependencies include the structure of the environment (the particular kinds and patterns of interrelationships that occur between tasks) and the uncertainty in the environment (both in the a priori structure of any episode within an environment and in the outcomes of an agent's actions). In this talk, I will briefly describe a modeling framework, TAEMS, for representing abstract task environments. TAEMS has been used both for environment modeling/simulation and as an internal representation for computer agents to plan, schedule, and coordinate thier activities with other agents (human or computer). I'll describe examples of both of these uses. This written summary provides a background bibliography, and pointers to the work discussed in the talk.