Coordination in Adaptive Organisations: Extending SharedPlans with Knowledge Cultivation

Abstract

Agent-based simulation can be used to investigate behaviouralrequirements, capabilities and strategies that might be helpful in complex, dynamic and adaptive situations, and can be used in training scenarios. In this paper, we study the requirements of coordination in complex unfolding scenarios in which agents may come and go and wherethere is no fixed organisational structure, with an eye to developing asimulation framework that can be part of a training system in the domain of emergency management. We argue the need for an extensionto the SharedPlans formalism required to support the sharing of knowledge about a dynamically unfolding situation, specfically: who is in theteam, and who holds relevant knowledge. Our rationale for such an extension is presented based on a prior case study of a railway accidentand a further analysis of the coordination and communication activitiesamongst the disaster management team during its recovery. We concludethat in addition to the obligations imposed by the standard SharedPlansframework, agents in complex unfolding scenarios also need knowledgecultivation processes to reason about the dynamic organisational struc-ture and the changing world state. We briefly express the requirementsof knowledge cultivation as obligations that could be imposed on agents.