The goal of the Electric Elves project was to develop software agent technology to support human organizations. We developed a variety of applications of the Elves, including scheduling visitors, managing a research group (the Office Elves), and monitoring travel (the Travel Elves). The Travel Elves were eventually deployed at DARPA, where things did not go exactly as planned. In this article, we describe some of the things that went wrong and then present some of the lessons learned and new research that arose from our experience in building the Travel Elves.

In fact, DARPA, which funded the project, ways. Elves) (Scerri, Pynadath, and Tambe 2002; Finally, we will present some lessons Pynadath and Tambe 2003) and required learned and recent research that was motivated detailed information about the calendars by our experiences in deploying the of people using the system. Thus, we decided to deploy a new application of the Electric The Travel Elves introduced two major Elves, called the Travel Elves. This application advantages over traditional approaches to appeared to be ideal for wider deployment travel planning. First, the Travel Elves provided since it could be hosted entirely outside an interactive approach to making an organization and communication travel plans in which all of the data could be performed over wireless devices, required to make informed choices is such as cellular telephones. For example, when The mission of the Travel Elves (Ambite deciding whether to park at the airport or et al. 2002, Knoblock 2004) was to facilitate take a taxi, the system compares the cost planning a trip and to ensure that the of parking and the cost of a taxi given other resulting travel plan would execute selections, such as the airport, the specific smoothly. Initial deployment of the Travel parking lot, and the starting location Elves at DARPA went smoothly.