Multiagent teamwork: analyzing the optimality and complexity of key theories and models

Despite the significant progress in multiagent teamwork, existing research does not address the optimality of its prescriptions nor the complexity of the teamwork problem. Thus, we cannot determine whether the assumptions and approximations made by a particular theory gain enough efficiency to justify the losses in overall performance. To provide a tool for evaluating this tradeoff, we present a unified framework, the COMmunicative Multiagent Team Decision Problem (COM-MTDP) model, which is general enough to subsume many existing models of multiagent systems. We analyze use the COM-MTDP model to provide a breakdown of the computational complexity of constructing optimal teams under problem domains divided along the dimensions of observability and communication cost. We then exploit the COM-MTDP's ability to encode existing teamwork theories and models to encode two instantiations of joint intentions theory, including STEAM. We then derive a domain-independent criterion for optimal communication and provide a comparative analysis of the two joint intentions instantiations. We have implemented a reusable, domain-independent software package based COM-MTDPs to analyze teamwork coordination strategies, and we demonstrate its use by encoding and evaluating the two joint intentions strategies within an example domain.