Situation awareness in intelligent agents: foundations for a theory of proactive agent behavior

This work outlines a computational model of situation awareness. This model serves two purposes. First, it provides a detailed description for our everyday notion of situation awareness. Second, it offers an alternative perspective of looking into the nature and characteristics of proactive behavior in intelligent agent systems. Most of the existing definitions of proactiveness do not possess the relevant details to encourage rigorous studies of enhancing an agent´s capability to anticipate and deal with foreseeable situations. This work intends to fill this gap by suggesting a working definition of proactiveness, which place additional emphasis on its underpinning cognitive process and its role in directing an agent´s attention. A brief discussion of using situation awareness as meta-level control to direct a resource-bounded agent´s attention is also included.