Helping teams negotiate disruptions during task execution using distributed personal assistants

People often collaborate on tasks, but they are also constantly overloaded. As humans, we find it particularly challenging when our local failures not only affect ourselves but also disrupt the smooth execution of the teams. This thesis provides a decision aid, d-Uhura, to help in these situations. d-Uhura is a set of computational assistants that help individuals adapt quickly to disruptions. Typically, automated systems resort to replanning when execution failures occur. However, replanning is too disruptive for human teams, and people often adapt to small failures by relaxing their requirements on the fly. By building upon Uhura, a personal assistant that helps users deal with plan over-subscription, d-Uhura can negotiate with its user to relax temporal constraints, such as deadlines, to quickly adapt to execution failures. However, Uhura is built for single users and does not consider their interaction with other individuals.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2019

Author dc:creator

• Zhang, Yuening,S.M.Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Brian C. Williams.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/122687

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/122687