of agents or include humans, has some joint activity, α . Each entity in the team works cooperatively on the joint activity. The agent, A, has a role, p, in the team. Depending on the specific task, some or all of the roles will need to be performed successfully in order for the joint activity to succeed. The primary goal of the agent is the success of α which it pursues by performing ρ . Performing ρ requires that one or more non-trivial decisions are made.  To make a decision, d, the agent can draw upon n other entities from a set E = {el . . . en}, which typically includes the agent itself. Each entity in E (e.g., a human user) is capable of making decision d . The entities in E are not necessarily part of the team performing α . Different agents and users will have differing abilities to make decisions due to available computational resources, access to relevant information, etc. Coordination constraints, ~, exist between p and the roles of other members of the team. For example, various roles might need to be executed simultaneously or in a certain order or with some combined quality or total cost. A critical facet of the successful completion of the joint task a, given its jointness, is to ensure that coordination between team members is maintained, i.e., ~ are not violated. Thus, we can describe an AA problem instance with the tuple: (A, a, p, ~, d, E).

From an AA perspective, the agent can take two types of actions for a decision, d.

First, it can transfer control to an entity in E capable of making that decision. In general, there are no restrictions on when, how often or for how long decision-making control can be transferred to a particular entity. Typically, the agent can also transfer decision-making control to itself. In general, we assume that when the agent transfers control, it does not have any guarantee on the exact time of response or exact quality of the decision made by the entity to which control is transferred. In fact, in some cases it will not know whether the entity will be able to make a decision at all or even whether the entity will know it has decision-making control, e.g., if control was transferred via email, the agent may not know if the user actually read the email.

The second type of action that an agent can take is to request changes in the coordination constraints, ~, between team members. A coordination change gives the agent the possibility of changing the requirements surrounding the decision to be made, e.g., the required timing, cost or quality of the decision, which may allow it to better fulfill its responsibilities. A coordination change might involve reordering or delaying tasks or it may involve changing roles, or it may be a more dramatic change where the team pursues α in a completely different way.  Changing coordination has some cost, but it may be better to incur this cost than violate coordination constraints, i.e., incur miscoordination costs. Miscoordination between team members will occur for many reasons, e.g., a constraint that limits the total cost of a joint task might be violated if one team member incurs a higher than expected cost and other team members do not reduce their costs. In this article, we are primarily concerned with constraints related to the timing of roles, e.g., ordering constraints or requirements on simultaneous execution. This in turn, usually requires that the agent guards against delayed decisions although it can also require that a decision is not made too soon.

Thus, the AA problem for the agent, given a problem instance, (A, α, ρ, χ, d, E), is to choose the transfer-of-control or coordination-change actions that maximizes the overall expected utility of the team. In the remainder of this section we describe a concrete, real¬