Page 198 - Socially Intelligent Agents Creating Relationships with Computers and Robots

Chapter 22

SOCIALLY SITUATED PLANNING

Jonathan Gratch
USC Institute for Creative Technologies

Abstract This chapter describes techniques to incorporate richer models of social behavior
into deliberative planning agents, providing them the capability to obey organi-
zational constraints and engage in self-interested and collaborative behavior in
the context of virtual training environments.

1. Socially Situated Planning

Virtual environments such as training simulators and video games do an im-
pressive job at modelling the physical dynamics but fall short when modelling
the social dynamics of anything but the most impoverished human encoun-
ters. Yet the social dimension is at least as important as graphics for creating
an engaging game or effective training tool. Flight simulators can accurately
model the technical aspects of flight but many aviation disasters arise from so-
cial breakdowns: poor crew management, or the effects of stress and emotion
on decision-making. Perhaps the biggest consumer of simulation technology,
the U.S. military, identifies unrealistic human and organizational behavior as a
major limitation of existing simulation technology [5].
There are many approaches to modelling social behavior. Socially-situated
planning focuses on the problem of generating and executing plans in the con-
text of social constraints. It draws inspiration from the shared-plans work of
Grosz and Kraus [3], relaxes the assumption that agents are cooperative and
builds on more conventional artificial intelligence planning techniques. Social
reasoning is modelled as an additional layer of reasoning atop a general pur-
pose planning. The planner handles task-level behaviors whereas the social
layer manages communication and biases plan generation and execution in ac-