Agents situated in dynamic environments can be supplied in advance with a repertoire of plans that permit them to rapidly generate appropriate sequences of actions in response to important events. When agents can form teams, new problems emerge regarding the representation and execution of joint actions. In this paper we introduce a language for representing joint plans for teams of agents, we describe how agents can organize the formation of a suitably skilled team to achieve a joint goal, and we explain how such a team can execute these plans to generate complex, synchronized team activity. The formalism provides a framework for representing and reasoning about joint actions in which various approaches to co-ordination and commitment can be explored.

Air tra c worldwide continued to grow in 1993, despite the medium-term e ects of the recession in many countries. The direct and indirect costs attributable to air tra c congestion are already enormous, and are predicted to rise to US$10 billion in Europe alone. The challenge is to match the demand with the available capacity. The alternatives are to increase capacity, restrict demand or achieve more e cient utilization of the existing infrastructure. Increasing capacity requires enormous capital expenditure, while restricting demand leads to revenue loss. Some relief can be provided through increasing e ciency, the rationale for the development of new air tra c management procedures and accompanying systems. This paper discusses the di culties of improving air tra c management, and new solutions to these problems.

Knowledge-based decision-support systems for anesthesia monitoring have been explored for their potential value in providing data integration, in automating some controls, and in reducing the cognitive load on the anesthesiologist. By addressing these components of the monitoring and decision tasks of the anesthesiologist it is assumed that direct benefit would accrue to the patient by improving the quality, reliability or speed of decision-making.

This paper describes research into automated support for air tra c controllers performing tactical air tra c management. It describes the OASIS system developed to help alleviate air tra c congestion. The system achieves this by maximizing runway utilization, achieved through arranging landing aircraft into an optimal order, assigning them a landing time, and then monitoring the progress of each individual aircraft in real time. OASIS is agent-oriented: its major components are independent agents, each solving a part of the overall problem. The system's exible behavior results in part from this co-operative problem solving approach, and in part from the multiple levels of feedback employed between agents in the system and between the system and its environment. The highly dynamic nature of the air tra c control environment places very stringent real-time constraints on the system's reasoning processes, and requires the system to exhibit both goal-directed and reactive behavior. OASIS computes the landing sequence using an any-time algorithm. OASIS is currently implemented using the Procedural Reasoning System (PRS), a real-time reasoning system capable of reasoning about and performing complex tasks in a robust and exible manner.

A rational agent can be viewed as a system embedded in the real world, continuouslyreceiving perceptual input from the real world and responding by taking actions thataffect the world. Such rational agents cooperating with each other is a natural extensionof the single agent paradigm and will be called planned team activity. Some of theissues involved in planned team activity include, forming the right team for carryingout a given task (team formation); establishing joint mental...

This paper describes the prototype artificial intelligence based Air Traffic ManagementSystem (ATMS) being developed by the Australian Artificial Intelligence Institutefor the Australian Civil Aviation Authority. The ATMS system research was undertakento investigate the effectiveness of applying artificial intelligence techniques to the air trafficmanagement problem. Tactical air traffic management in Australia is performed bya Flow Controller who sets up the landing sequence by directing...

This report addresses the problems of flow management activities of air-traffic controland scheduling. It introduces the methods and algorithms which will be used in theDATMS system to solve these problems.1 IntroductionAir traffic in Australia and internationally is presently subject to significant delays due tocongestion at airports, runways, airways, sectors, and waypoints. The number of delayedflights is increasing and the length of the delays is also growing. In addition, the...