Formulating dynamic agents’ operational state via situation awareness assessment

• Main Authors: Mostafa, S.A., Sharifuddin Ahmad, M., Annamalai, M., Ahmad, A., Gunasekaran, S.S.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2017
• Subjects: Autonomous agents

Managing autonomy in a dynamic interactive system that contains a mix of human and software agent intelligence is a challenging task. In such systems, giving an agent a complete control over its autonomy is a risky practice while manually setting the agent’s autonomy level is an inefficient approach. This paper addresses this issue via formulating a Situation Awareness Assessment (SAA) technique to assist in determining an appropriate agents’ operational state. We propose four operational states of agents’ execution cycles; proceed, halt, block and terminate, each of which is determined based on the agents’ performance. We apply the SAA technique in a proposed Layered Adjustable Autonomy (LAA) model. The LAA conceptualizes autonomy as a spectrum and is constructed in a layered structure. The SAA and the LAA notions are applicable to humans’ and agents’ collaborative environment. We provide an experimental scenario to test and validate the proposed notions in a real-time application. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015.