Modelling awareness of agents using policies

In addition to cooperation, research in disaster management exposes the need for policy awareness to recognize relevant information in enhancing cooperation. Intelligent software agents have previously been employed for problem solving in disaster situations but without incorporating how the agents can create or model awareness. This paper presents an awareness based modelling method, called MAAP, to maintain awareness of software agents of a given set of policies. The paper presents preliminary results indicating that the use of policies as a source of awareness, as facilitated by MAAP, is a potentially effective method to enhance cooperation.