Coordination of concurrent scenarios in multi-agent interaction

Though research on agents that interact with humans via voice or text has been intensively conducted, agents that can interact with more than two persons in parallel have not been studied well. To enable an agent to interact with multiple people, we propose a method to assign multiple scenarios to one agent, in which each scenario describes an interaction protocol between the agent and one person. Obviously, coordination among multiple scenarios is required to avoid conflicts in actions. For example, one agent cannot execute both walking and sitting actions simultaneously. However, what is more important is that a coordination policy, a way of specifying how to manage conflicts among multiple actions, must be introduced. In this paper, we introduce a coordination scenario that avoids conflicts in actions and coordinates scenarios according to a coordination policy. The coordination scenario, which controls the execution of interaction scenarios by communication, is generated by a coordination policy for solving conflicts. When the coordination scenario receives a request to execute actions from an interaction scenario, it checks whether the actions will trigger conflicts and sends an order not to execute them if conflicts will occur. The coordination scenario interworks concurrent interaction scenarios by executing this process repeatedly.