Intelligent decision support to assist real-time collaboration

Under conditions associated with real-time decisions, humans may experience stressors such as information overload, time pressure, emotional intensity, and uncertainty. These pressures increase with distributed teams that must collaborate to make decisions in rapidly changing environments over networks due to factors such as delays or misunderstandings in communication. Intelligent decision support systems attempt to mitigate these issues by integrating capabilities from the human user and artificial intelligence. One of the most promising technologies for real applications is intelligent agents. Agents are generally described as software programs that are autonomous, adaptive, proactive, reactive, communicative, cooperative, mobile, goal- driven and persistent in performing their tasks. Using these characteristics, agents and multi-agent teams can be integrated into decision support systems to perform tasks such as monitoring, alerting, learning, and even making decisions. This talk looks at intelligent decision support for real-time collaboration. We present an application to an autonomous robotic vehicle in which decision making is shared by the human/machine team.