A combined top-down and bottom-up approach to integrated task-decomposition and allocation

Two important issues involved in collaborative problem solving are the decomposition of complex tasks into smaller (primitive) subtask and assigning these to the agents in the system. A decomposition done without being aware of the availability of certain agents may not be realistic and may raise a need for decomposing the task again. Task decomposition and task allocation cannot be done in a sequential order but should be interleaved. The dependencies among the tasks and, hence, between the agents that collaborate is extracted from the task decomposition and converted into rules. A team space, based on a blackboard-like architecture manages dependencies through these rules represented in the rule base. This paper describes an integrated task decomposition and task allocation approach for forming a team, and a team space architecture for managing dependencies through result sharing.