Towards flexible teamwork in persistent teams

M. Tambe, Weixiong Zhang
Proceedings International Conference on Multi Agent Systems (Cat. No.98EX160)  
Teamwork is a critical capability in multi-agent environments. Many such environments mandate that the agents and agent-teams must be p ersistent i.e., exist over long periods of time. Agents in such persistent teams are b ound together by their long-term common interests and goals. This paper focuses on exible teamwork in such persistent teams. Unfortunately, while previous work has investigated exible teamwork, persistent teams remain unexplored. For exible tamwork, one promising approach
more » ... has emerged i s m o del-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 decisiontheoretic technique to enable persistent teams to overcome such limitations of the model-based approach. In particular, agents reason about expected t e am utilities of future t e am states that are p r ojected t o r esult from actions recommended by the teamwork model, as well as lower-cost (or higher-cost) variations on these actions. To a c comodate 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 p r esented.
doi:10.1109/icmas.1998.699065 dblp:conf/icmas/TambeZ98 fatcat:44qyswmwjvegzaat6msa6wlsnu