An integrated computer-based procedure for teamwork in digital nuclear power plants

Computer-based procedures (CBPs) are expected to improve operator performance in nuclear power plants (NPPs), but they may reduce the openness of interaction between team members and harm teamwork consequently. To support teamwork in the main control room of an NPP, this study proposed a team-level integrated CBP that presents team members' operation status and execution histories to one another. Through a laboratory experiment, we compared the new integrated design and the existing individual CBP design. Sixty participants, randomly divided into twenty teams of three people each, were assigned to the two conditions to perform simulated emergency operating procedures. The results showed that compared with the existing CBP design, the integrated CBP reduced the effort of team communication and improved team transparency. The results suggest that this novel design is effective to optim team process, but its impact on the behavioural outcomes may be moderated by more factors, such as task duration.

Practitioner Summary: The study proposed and evaluated a team-level integrated computer-based procedure, which present team members' operation status and execution history to one another. The experimental results show that compared with the traditional procedure design, the integrated design reduces the effort of team communication and improves team transparency.     

From roles to teamwork: A framework and architecture

Teamwork requires organization, strategies, and coordination. The design of a multiagent system should support these conceptual properties for constructing effective teams. The advantage of a teamwork approach is the reduction in complexity of the task through distribution of responsibilities, resulting in better utilization of resources, robust behaviors, and a greater variety of behaviors against competitors. In this article a framework for building teams of responsible agents using roles, responsibilities, and strategies is described. Its application to the domain of soccer is used to design a high-performance team of soccer agents. The architecture for these agents utilizes a reactive planning system with support for teamwork. The team of soccer agents will be tested in a series of competitions against other teams in the real-time soccer simulator proposed for Robocup-97, which provides an uncertain, resource bounded world.     

Towards Flexible Teamwork in Persistent Teams: Extended Report

Teamwork is a critical capability in multi-agent environments. Many such environments mandate that the agents and agent-teams must be persistent i.e., exist over long periods of time. Agents in such persistent teams are bound together by their long-term common interests and goals. This paper focuses on flexible teamwork in such persistent teams. Unfortunately, while previous work has investigated flexible teamwork, persistent teams remain unexplored. For flexible teamwork, one promising approach that has emerged is model-based, i.e., providing agents with general models of teamwork that explicitly specify their commitments in teamwork. Such models enable agents to autonomously reason about coordination. Unfortunately, for persistent teams, such models may lead to coordination and communication actions that while locally optimal, are highly problematic for the team's long-term goals. We present a decision-theoretic technique based on Markov decision processes to enable persistent teams to overcome such limitations of the model-based approach. In particular, agents reason about expected team utilities of future team states that are projected to result from actions recommended by the teamwork model, as well as lower-cost (or higher-cost) variations on these actions. To accommodate real-time constraints, this reasoning is done in an any-time fashion. Implemented examples from an analytic search tree and some real-world domains are presented.     

Surviving the paradoxes of virtual teamwork

Despite the potential benefits of virtual teams, current literature suggests that virtual teamwork is rife with complex challenges. We frame some of these challenges as paradoxes inherent in the concept of virtual teamwork. Based on interviews with 42 leaders and members of virtual teams, we identify five paradoxes: (1) virtual teams require physical presence; (2) flexibility of virtual teamwork is aided by structure; (3) interdependent work in virtual teams is accomplished by members' independent contributions; (4) task-oriented virtual teamwork succeeds through social interactions; and (5) mistrust is instrumental to establishing trust among virtual team members. In addition, we identify strategies that respondents used to cope with, or 'survive' the paradoxes of virtual teamwork.     

Project teaming: Knowledge-intensive design for composing team members

Enterprises frequently use project teams to perform various tasks. In a human-centered, highly collaborative environment, the importance of teamwork exceeds that of individual skill. Appropriate team composition is crucial to the success of ad-hoc teamwork, yet optimizing team composition is challenging. This study utilizes knowledge-intensive approaches to build project teaming models into ontologies. Furthermore, it helps develop a set of logic rules for identifying semantic relationships between individuals. By following a knowledge-base creation process, the factual data of project, workers, and teaming factors can be inserted into ontologies. Based on knowledge inference, reliable knowledge bases are established for selecting project team members in runtime. A case study is presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed design. Experimental lessons demonstrate that combining rules with ontological knowledge bases not only serves team composition needs, but also achieves knowledge base durability and system reliability.     

How the Network Position of R&D Team Managers and Members Affects their Evaluations of Creative Performance

Monitoring the creative performance of R&D teams as the nucleus of creating new knowledge is inherently difficult. In most cases, only the team managers and team members can be tapped as reliable sources of information. However, there are indications that neither team managers nor team members provide a sufficient introspection to evaluate the R&D team's creative performance. This contradiction was investigated in 51 R&D teams by examining the team managers' and members' network position and their resulting performance evaluations. The central findings of the study are that team managers and members evaluate the creative performance of their R&D teams more negatively when the amount and variety of information they are supplied are insufficient and that there are no relevant differences between team managers' and team members' evaluations or network positions.     

无线移动环境中基于移动Agent的实时构件组装机制研究

由于无线网络较窄、昂贵的带宽，及移动设备自身有限的硬件能力，在无线移动环境中进行实时构件组装调用时面临着更多的技术挑战，需要一种高效、可靠的机制给予支持。本文提出一种基于移动Agent的无线网络环境构件组装调用机制。该机制利用移动Agent作为移动客户端与构件服务器之间交互的中介，提供了灵活、可配置的组装结构，从而有效避免移动客户端不必要的访问操作，节省了移动客户端的无线网络连接开销，与其他机制相比有着较高的执行效率；同时该机制可有效支持移动客户端发生故障后的状态恢复，从而确保运行过程的可靠性。最后本文通过实验分析了MAWA机制的可靠性与高效性。     

A privacy mechanism for mobile-based urban traffic monitoring

In mobile-based traffic monitoring applications, each user provides real-time updates on their location and speed while driving. This data is collected by a centralized server and aggregated to provide participants with current traffic conditions. Successful participation in traffic monitoring applications utilizing participatory sensing depends on two factors: the information utility of the estimated traffic condition, and the amount of private information (position and speed) each participant reveals to the server. We assume each user prefers to reveal as little private information as possible, but if everyone withholds information, the quality of traffic estimation will deteriorate. In this paper, we model these opposing requirements by considering each user to have a utility function that combines the benefit of high quality traffic estimates and the cost of privacy loss. Using a novel Markovian model, we mathematically derive a policy that takes into account the mean, variance and correlation of traffic on a given stretch of road and yields the optimal granularity of information revelation to maximize user utility. We validate the effectiveness of this policy through real-world empirical traces collected during the Mobile Century experiment in Northern California. The validation shows that the derived policy yields utilities that are very close to what could be obtained by an oracle scheme with full knowledge of the ground truth.     

Pervasive Software Environments for Supporting Disaster Responses

In complex emergency scenarios, teams from various emergency-response organizations must collaborate. These teams include both first responders, such as police and fire departments, and those operators who coordinate the effort from operational centers. The Workpad architecture consists of a front- and a back-end layer. The front-end layer is composed of several front-end teams of first responders, and the back-end layer is an integrated peer-to-peer network that lets front-end teams collaborate through information exchange and coordination. Team members at the front end carry PDAs, with team leaders' PDAs equipped with gateway communication technologies that let them communicate with the back-end centers.     

Antecedents and consequences of team potency in software development projects

Developing new software quickly, successfully, and at low cost is critical in organizations. Ways of assessing the effectiveness of development teams has highlighted measures of factors, such as teamwork, group cohesiveness, and team integration, but the use of group potency theory (the collective belief of a group that it can be effective) is rare. In our study, we investigated antecedents of and consequences to group potency in software development project teams. By examining 53 software development project teams collected from small and medium-sized software firms in Turkey, we found, that team potency positively affected speed-to-market, development cost, and market success of the product. We also found that trust among project team members, past experiences of the members, and team empowerment had a positive impact on the team potency during the project. Managerial and theoretical implications are discussed.     

Analyses of team performance in a dynamic task environment

Teamwork, a central component of team research, is not readily observable and must be inferred from the manner in which teams operate. Of particular interest is the measurement and evaluation of teamwork. The goal of this paper is to explore the assessment of team data using a temporal accuracy measure called the Relative Accuracy Index (RAI). For the statistical analysis, the generalized mixed model was applied. This model is applicable for binomial data and takes into account the correlation structure within team members. We describe the statistical procedure in detail, aiming to guide researchers who encounter similar problems. Using our statistical analysis, we found that participants whose training focused on coordination activities outperformed those whose training did not. Moreover, we found that workload stress accentuates the difference.     

Preparing to work in the virtual organization

Forming virtual organizations (VOs) is a new workplace strategy that is also needed to prepare information, technology, and knowledge workers for functioning well in inter-organizational teams. University information studies programs can simulate VOs in courses and teach certain skill sets that are needed in VO work: critical thinking, analytical methods, ethical problem solving, stakeholder analysis, and writing policy are among the needed skills and abilities. Simulated virtual teams allow participants to learn to trust team members and to understand how communication and product development can work effectively in a virtual workspace. It is hoped that some of these methods could be employed in corporate training programs also.In an innovative course, inter-university VOs were created to develop information products. Groups in four geographically dispersed universities cooperated in the project; at its conclusion, students answered a self-administered survey about their experience. Each team’s success or difficulties were apparently closely related to issues of trust in the team process. Access to and ease of communication tools also played a role in the participants’ perceptions of the learning experience and teamwork.     

Task decomposition, dynamic role assignment, and low-bandwidth communication for real-time strategic teamwork

Multi-agent domains consisting of teams of agents that need to collaborate in an adversarial environment offer challenging research opportunities. In this article, we introduce periodic team synchronization (PTS) domains as time-critical environments in which agents act autonomously with low communication, but in which they can periodically synchronize in a full-communication setting. The two main contributions of this article are a flexible team agent structure and a method for inter-agent communication. First, the team agent structure allows agents to capture and reason about team agreements. We achieve collaboration between agents through the introduction of formations. A formation decomposes the task space defining a set of roles. Homogeneous agents can flexibly switch roles within formations, and agents can change formations dynamically, according to pre-defined triggers to be evaluated at run-time. This flexibility increases the performance of the overall team. Our teamwork structure further includes pre-planning for frequently occurring situations. Second, the communication method is designed for use during the low-communication periods in PTS domains. It overcomes the obstacles to inter-agent communication in multi-agent environments with unreliable, single-channel, high-cost, low-bandwidth communication. We fully implemented both the flexible teamwork structure and the communication method in the domain of simulated robotic soccer, and conducted controlled empirical experiments to verify their effectiveness. In addition, our simulator team made it to the semi-finals of the RoboCup-97 competition, in which 29 teams participated. It achieved a total score of 67–9 over six different games, and successfully demonstrated its flexible teamwork structure and inter-agent communication.     

The Effects of Communication Modality on Performance and Self-Ratings of Teamwork Components

Based on McGrath and Hollingshead's adaptation of media richness theory and a model of team performance, a laboratory study was designed to compare the effects of three communication modalities of increasing richness on a complex psychomotor/intellective task (i.e., audio only, shared workspace, face-to-face). When teams worked face-to-face, they reported teamwork behaviors to a greater extent than when they worked via audio, and team members perceived their performance to be greater when face-to-face than when using audio alone. The use of a shared workspace enhanced some aspects of perceived team processes, such that distributed teams reported teamwork behaviors to a greater extent than when using audio alone. Teams also committed fewer errors when using a shared workspace than when using audio alone. Practical implications and limitations are discussed.     

Using Project-Based-Learning in a mobile application development course—An experience report

In this paper, we report the experience gained in a Mobile Application Development course. We involved students in Computer Science at the University of Salerno, who in teams had to conduct a project. The goal of this project was to design and develop applications (or simply app) for Android-based devices. The adopted teaching approach was based on Project-Based-Learning and enhanced collaboration and competition. Collaboration took place among members of the same team (intra-team), while competition among different teams of students (extra-team). To allow intra-team collaboration, students used GitHub as Computer-Supported-Collaborative-Learning tool. It provided support for implicit and explicit communication among members in each team and for distributed revision control and management of software artifacts (e.g., source code and requirements models). Developed apps underwent a final public competition prized by IT managers of national and international software companies. This is how we implemented extra-team competition. IT managers expressed a positive judgment on both students׳ competition and developed apps. Also, students provided very good feedback on used teaching approach and support GitHub provided.     

Predicting teamwork results from social network analysis

Modelling students' behaviours has reached a status that can only be overcome by improving the ability of predicting the results on teamwork. Indeed, teamwork is an important piece on the learning process, but understanding their mechanisms and predicting the results achieved is far from being solved by traditional classifiers. In this paper, we address the problem of predicting teamwork results, and propose a recommender system that suggests new teams, in the context of a given curricular unit. Any student, who is looking for a team, may use the system; in particular, he may ask for the best team to join, either considering all available colleagues or just the set of his previous teammates. Our system makes use of social network analysis and classification methods as the algorithmic core of the decision‐making process. System evaluation is presented through a set of experimental results, which report the performance of social network analysis and classification algorithms over real datasets.     

Effects of automation of information-processing functions on teamwork

We investigated the effects of automation as applied to different stages of information processing on team performance in a complex decision-making task. Forty teams of 2 individuals performed a simulated Theater Defense Task. Four automation conditions were simulated with computer assistance applied to realistic combinations of information acquisition, information analysis, and decision selection functions across two levels of task difficulty. Multiple measures of team effectiveness and team coordination were used. Results indicated different forms of automation have different effects on teamwork. Compared with a baseline condition, an increase in automation of information acquisition led to an increase in the ratio of information transferred to information requested; an increase in automation of information analysis resulted in higher team coordination ratings; and automation of decision selection led to better team effectiveness under low levels of task difficulty but at the cost of higher workload. The results support the use of early and intermediate forms of automation related to acquisition and analysis of information in the design of team tasks. Decision-making automation may provide benefits in more limited contexts. Applications of this research include the design and evaluation of automation in team environments.     

A QoS-aware VoD resource sharing scheme for heterogeneous networks

In network-aware concept, applications are aware of network conditions and are adaptable to the varying environment to achieve acceptable and predictable performance. Two basic aspects of network-aware applications, network-awareness and network adaptation, have been widely addressed in the literature. In this work, a solution for video on demand service that integrates wireless and wired networks by using the network-aware concepts is proposed to reduce the blocking probability and dropping probability of mobile requests. Fuzzy logic inference system is employed to select appropriate cache relay nodes to cache published video streams and distribute them to different peers through service oriented architecture (SOA). SIP-based control protocol and IMS standard are adopted in this work to ensure the possibility of heterogeneous communication and provide a framework for delivering real-time multimedia services over an IP-based network to ensure interoperability, roaming, and end-to-end session management. The experimental results demonstrate that effectiveness and practicability of the proposed work.     

A tool supporting root cause analysis for synchronous retrospectives in distributed software teams

ContextRoot cause analysis (RCA) is a useful practice for software project retrospectives, and is typically carried out in synchronous collocated face-to-face meetings. Conducting RCA with distributed teams is challenging, as face-to-face meetings are infeasible. Lack of adequate real-time tool support exacerbates this problem. Furthermore, there are no empirical studies on using RCA in synchronous retrospectives of geographically distributed teams.ObjectiveThis paper presents a real-time cloud-based software tool (ARCA-tool) we developed to support RCA in distributed teams and its initial empirical evaluation. The feasibility of using RCA with distributed teams is also evaluated.MethodWe compared our tool with 35 existing RCA software tools. We conducted field studies of four distributed agile software teams at two international software product companies. The teams conducted RCA collaboratively in synchronous retrospective meetings by using the tool we developed. We collected the data using observations, interviews and questionnaires.ResultsComparison revealed that none of the existing 35 tools matched all the features of our ARCA-tool. The team members found ARCA-tool to be an essential part of their distributed retrospectives. They considered the software as efficient and very easy to learn and use. Additionally, the team members perceived RCA to be a vital part of the retrospectives. In contrast to the prior retrospective practices of the teams, the introduced RCA method was evaluated as efficient and easy to use.ConclusionRCA is a useful practice in synchronous distributed retrospectives. However, it requires software tool support for enabling real-time view and co-creation of a cause-effect diagram. ARCA-tool supports synchronous RCA, and includes support for logging problems and causes, problem prioritization, cause-effect diagramming, and logging of process improvement proposals. It enables conducting RCA in distributed retrospectives.     

Social psychophysiological compliance in a four-person research team

A continuous, non-invasive and objective measure of teamwork effectiveness could be very useful to the human factors design community. Social psychophysiological compliance (SPC), estimated by scoring the extent that heart rate variation was synchronous across team members, was explored as a predictor of teamwork effectiveness during 20 real planning meetings over a 6-month period. Speech activity and heart rate variability of all four (2 male, 2 female) team members were continuously monitored. Exploratory analyses tested if team member ratings of various aspects of teamwork effectiveness were predicted by SPC scored (1) over whole meetings, (2) during one team member's speech, (3) during periods in which two team members spoke in sequence or (4) over 30-s periods and averaging highest values. SPC during periods of sequential speech negatively predicted team members' ratings of Team productivity, Quality of communication, and Ability to work together. SPC shows potential as an objective, non-invasive means to monitor teamwork effectiveness but this relationship warrants further investigation and replication before use in ergonomics applications.