Joint Commitment Team

Problem

Silent abandonment is the recurring failure. Agent A discovers the goal is impossible (the data the team was going to analyse doesn't exist) and stops, but Agent B keeps preparing analysis tooling for the missing data. Agent C learns the goal has been satisfied by an external event but doesn't tell Agent D, who keeps running expensive computations. Without an explicit meta-commitment that team members notify each other on these state changes, joint tasks waste effort and produce stale outputs.

Solution

Following Cohen & Levesque's joint intentions framework: when agents form a team around a shared goal G, each agent commits to (a) pursue G as long as G is believed achievable, wanted, and unachieved, and (b) notify the rest as soon as it believes G is achieved, impossible, or no longer relevant. Notification is part of the contract, not extra-credit. The team's lifecycle has explicit transitions: forming, active, satisfied (notified by any member that G holds), impossible (notified by any member), abandoned (notified by the principal that G is no longer wanted).

When to use

• Multi-agent teams on shared goals with multi-step or multi-day runtime.
• Goal-state changes (satisfaction, infeasibility, abandonment) are realistic.
• Operators need an audit trail of when and why a team stopped.