Enhancing Group Cohesion in Virtual Communities of Practice

This paper describes software agents that monitor the formation of teams within the System-Oriented UAV simulator SOUL. Operators must be trained in virtual teams, working in communities of practice. According to the evaluation of their collective skills, users can then be placed in communities of competencies. For monitoring the interactions between operators, an agent framework facilitates the collaborative training, by pushing up contracts and aiding cohesion of human-teams. The contracts make the most with the direct use of e-portfolio for operators to gather the social dependencies on knowledge and skills. This allows us to assess operator´s actions in real time together with an immediate detection and analysis of misbehavior feedbacks, improving the whole situation awareness.