Smart RogAgent: Where Agents and Humans Team Up

The increasing diffusion of team building as a means to enhance social relations and define roles within teams, and the cost of setting up a real team building event, raises the pressing need of simulating team building activities in order to assess the effectiveness of different formats, run in different contexts and under different conditions, before one is selected for a particular scenario. The selection of a software platform employing software abstractions which are close to the real entities involved in a team building event, including human beings and their roles, goals, and organisations, paves the way to substituting some simulated entity with its real counterpart, moving from simulation to a hybrid application where real entities and their software “alter egos” can co-exist. We present the design of Smart RogAgent, a JaCaMo multi-agent system aimed at simulating rogaining, a special kind of team building activity. Once fully developed, Smart RogAgent will have the potential to allow artificial intelligent agents to enter human teams, and vice versa, providing the technological support for the creation of hybrid human-agent teams in a principled way.