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<article-title>Estimating Information Value in Collaborative Multi-Agent
Planning Systems</article-title>
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<author><a href="mailto:fsarned@eecs.harvard.edu"><name>David Sarne</name></a></author>
<aff>School of Engineering and Applied Sciences<br/> Harvard University, Cambridge MA 02138 USA</aff>

<author><a href="mailto:groszg@eecs.harvard.edu"><name>Barbara J. Grosz</name></a></author>
<aff>School of Engineering and Applied Sciences<br/> Harvard University, Cambridge MA 02138 USA</aff>

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<title>ABSTRACT</title>
<p>This paper addresses the problem of identifying the value of information
held by a teammate on a distributed, multi-agent team. It
focuses on a distributed scheduling task in which computer agents
support people who are carrying out complex tasks in a dynamic
environment. The paper presents a decision-theoretic algorithm for
determining the value of information that is potentially relevant to
schedule revisions, but is directly available only to the person and
not the computer agent. The design of a "coordination autonomy"
(CA) module within a coordination-manager system provided the
empirical setting for this work. By design, the CA module depends
on an external scheduler module to determine the specific effect of
additional information on overall system performance. The paper
describes two methods for reducing the number of queries the CA
issues to the scheduler, enabling it to satisfy computational resource
constraints placed on it. Experimental results indicate the algorithm
improves system performance and establish the exceptional
efficiency&#8211;measured in terms of the number of queries required
for estimating the value of information-that can be achieved by
the query&#8211;reducing methods.</p>
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