Towards Levels of Cooperation

The interest of cooperation is more and more highlighted. When competition has been presented as the main driving force of species evolution, cooperation is today presented as the mean for everything or everyone to reach the necessary symbiosis with another one to exist and to evolve. Cooperation has been central to our studies now for over twenty years, with the conviction that automation has to take part in evolution supporting individual activity with an assistance system or supporting interactions. Model of cooperative activity is presented in order to help to define such supports, as well as Levels of Cooperation (LoC) which are combinations of parts of the model. Nevertheless, each one is always assessing the interest of cooperation by the valuation of the risk to loose or the chance to earn something. In this paper, we propose to use BCD (Benefit/Cost/Deficit) model to assess such a risk or chance to cooperate. Model of cooperative activity in terms of know-how and know-how-to-cooperate and model of BCD are first presented and used together in order to define a way to design and to evaluate new or existing human(s)-machine(s) systems.