A method for conflict detection based on team intention inference

One of the typical causes of errors in team cooperative activities, such as in central control rooms of power plants and cockpits in aircrafts, is conflicts among team members' intentions. If mutual awareness and communication were perfectly established and maintained, conflicts could be detected and recovered by team members; however, this does not happen in practice. In this paper, we provide a framework for detecting conflicts among team members' intentions based on team intention inference, aiming to make machines function as a coordinator for cooperative activities. In previous work, we developed a method for team intention inference based on a definition of ‘we-intention’. We-intention is other-regarding intentions relating to situations in which some agents act together, and is represented as a set of individual intentions and mutual beliefs. In this framework, a conflict can be defined as a set of individual intentions and false beliefs (undesired procedures), and detected by searching for such combinations. We applied the proposed method to the operation of a plant simulator operated by a two-person team, and it was confirmed through an experiment that this method could list candidates for conflicts by type and set the actual conflict high in priority in the tested context.