Group Thinking Support with Multiple Agents
Creative activities by a group, e.g., development of new products,
have recently become important and hence demands for groupware which
is able to support in stimulating human creativity have been
increasing. In this paper, aiming to achieve such a groupware system,
we first propose a group thinking model based on the transition of
mentality of thinking entity, and divide the group thinking into
several basic tasks based on the model. Then, we describe a creative
group thinking support system called ``AIDE,'' which we have been
researching and developing. We are developing AIDE by applying a
multi-agent architecture. Hence, we report our research as a
case-study of a multi-agent based system development. From our
experiences in the development and trial uses of AIDE, it has been
ascertained that a multi-agent architecture is a very suitable
architecture for achieving a group thinking support system. AIDE is
able to obtain many advantages derived from the multi-agent
architecture.