A decision-theoretic approach to collaboration: Principal description methods and efficient heuristic approximations

This chapter gives an overview of the state of the art in decision-theoretic models to describe cooperation between multiple agents in a dynamic environment. Making (near-) optimal decisions in such settings gets harder when the number of agents grows or the uncertainty about the environment increases. It is essential to have compact models, because otherwise just representing the decision problem becomes intractable. Several such model descriptions and approximate solution methods, studied in the Interactive Collaborative Information Systems project, are presented and illustrated in the context of crisis management.