How much should an agent know what other agents are doing in a cooperative team?

Cooperation in a task oriented multi agent team is important because a well designed cooperation strategy among a group of cooperating agents can lead to an increase of group performance. A challenging research issue in cooperation is to assess how much and to what extent an agent should consider the actions and effects of other agents. We address this issue in the context of an object search team. We first propose the concept of activity window to capture the view of an agent on the activities of the team. Then we pinpoint some criteria that can be used to determine whether it is beneficial for an agent to put an action of the team into its window. Finally, we present experimental results.