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An intelligent agent model with awareness of workflow progress

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  • Published: 08 February 2011
  • Volume 36, pages 498–510, (2012)
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An intelligent agent model with awareness of workflow progress
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  • Fiemke Both1,
  • Mark Hoogendoorn1,
  • Andy van der Mee2,
  • Jan Treur1 &
  • …
  • Michael de Vos2 
  • 1150 Accesses

  • 15 Citations

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Abstract

To support human functioning, ambient intelligent agents require knowledge about the tasks executed by the human. This knowledge includes design-time information like: (i) the goal of a task and (ii) the alternative ways for a human to achieve that goal, as well as run-time information such as the choices made by a human during task execution. In order to provide effective support, the agent must know exactly what steps the human is following. However, if not all steps along the path can be observed, it is possible that the agent cannot uniquely derive which path the human is following. Furthermore, in order to provide timely support, the agent must observe, reason, conclude and support within a limited period of time. To deal with these problems, this paper presents a generic focused reasoning mechanism to enable a guided selection of the path which is most likely followed by the human. This mechanism is based upon knowledge about the human and the workflow to perform the task. In order to come to such an approach, a reasoning mechanism is adopted in combination with the introduction of a new workflow representation, which is utilized to focus the reasoning process in an appropriate manner. The approach is evaluated by means of an extensive case study.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Artificial Intelligence, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, De Boelelaan 1081a, 1081 HV, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Fiemke Both, Mark Hoogendoorn & Jan Treur

  2. CAMS–Force Vision, Defence Material Organization, P.O. Box 10000, 1780 CA, Den Helder, The Netherlands

    Andy van der Mee & Michael de Vos

Authors
  1. Fiemke Both
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  2. Mark Hoogendoorn
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  3. Andy van der Mee
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  4. Jan Treur
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  5. Michael de Vos
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Fiemke Both.

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Open Access This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0), which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.

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Both, F., Hoogendoorn, M., van der Mee, A. et al. An intelligent agent model with awareness of workflow progress. Appl Intell 36, 498–510 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10489-010-0273-9

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  • Published: 08 February 2011

  • Issue date: March 2012

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10489-010-0273-9

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Keywords

  • Ambient agent
  • Workflow model
  • Task progress
  • Awareness
  • Model-based reasoning
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