Automatic generation of communication and teamwork within multi-agent teams

Teamwork and communication are two important processes within multi-agent systems designed to act in a coherent and coordinated manner. Modeling teamwork involves interleaving steps within shared plans that will allow agents to work together towards common goals. These steps involve reasoning about roles, responsibilities, and joint-intentions in order to coordinate activity amongst individuals. Communication facilitates teamwork. There are various complex forms of communication such as synchronization, coordination, and cooperation that allow for members of teams to use teamwork to their advantage. Explicitly defining every possible communication point within a team plan is too cumbersome and inflexible. In this paper, we describe a method to automatically decompose a team plan into a collection of individual agent plans, inserting all of the necessary communication points needed to properly generate coordinated behavior. This approach could be used to more accurately and easily model teamwork in multi-agent systems.

[1]  Hector J. Levesque,et al.  Intention is Choice with Commitment , 1990, Artif. Intell..

[2]  Jeffrey S. Rosenschein,et al.  Cooperation without Communication , 1986, AAAI.

[3]  E. J. Friedman-hill,et al.  Jess, the Java expert system shell , 1997 .

[4]  Sandip Sen,et al.  Learning to Coordinate without Sharing Information , 1994, AAAI.

[5]  Daniel Moldt,et al.  Multi-Agent-Systems Based on Coloured Petri Nets , 1997, ICATPN.

[6]  Michael P. Wellman,et al.  The Michigan Internet AuctionBot: a configurable auction server for human and software agents , 1998, AGENTS '98.

[7]  Randall W. Hill,et al.  Intelligent Agents for the Synthetic Battlefield: A Company of Rotary Wing Aircraft , 1997, AAAI/IAAI.

[8]  Katia P. Sycara,et al.  Middle-Agents for the Internet , 1997, IJCAI.

[9]  K. Suzanne Barber,et al.  Flexible problem-solving roles for autonomous agents , 2001, Integr. Comput. Aided Eng..

[10]  Timothy W. Finin,et al.  KQML as an agent communication language , 1994, CIKM '94.

[11]  Anand S. Rao,et al.  BDI Agents: From Theory to Practice , 1995, ICMAS.

[12]  Marcin Paprzycki,et al.  Distributed Computing: Fundamentals, Simulations and Advanced Topics , 2001, Scalable Comput. Pract. Exp..

[13]  Anand S. Rao,et al.  An architecture for real-time reasoning and system control , 1992, IEEE Expert.

[14]  Mica R. Endsley,et al.  Toward a Theory of Situation Awareness in Dynamic Systems , 1995, Hum. Factors.

[15]  Mark S. Fox,et al.  COOL: A Language for Describing Coordination in Multi Agent Systems , 1995, ICMAS.

[16]  Edmund H. Durfee,et al.  Trends in Cooperative Distributed Problem Solving , 1989, IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng..

[17]  Sarit Kraus,et al.  Collaborative Plans for Complex Group Action , 1996, Artif. Intell..

[18]  Jeffrey S. Rosenschein,et al.  Synchronization of Multi-Agent Plans , 1982, AAAI.

[19]  Jeffrey M. Bradshaw,et al.  KAoS: toward an industrial-strength open agent architecture , 1997 .

[20]  Allen Newell,et al.  SOAR: An Architecture for General Intelligence , 1987, Artif. Intell..

[21]  John Yen,et al.  A knowledge-based approach for designing intelligent team training systems , 2000, AGENTS '00.

[22]  Michael J. Pazzani,et al.  Syskill & Webert: Identifying Interesting Web Sites , 1996, AAAI/IAAI, Vol. 1.

[23]  Gary Klein,et al.  Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions , 2017 .

[24]  Rino Falcone,et al.  From Task Delegation to Role Delegation , 1997, AI*IA.

[25]  Victor R. Lesser,et al.  Designing a Family of Coordination Algorithms , 1997, ICMAS.

[26]  Eduardo Salas,et al.  Situation Awareness in Team Performance: Implications for Measurement and Training , 1995, Hum. Factors.

[27]  Jeffrey S. Rosenschein,et al.  Rules of Encounter - Designing Conventions for Automated Negotiation among Computers , 1994 .

[28]  Ken Lang,et al.  NewsWeeder: Learning to Filter Netnews , 1995, ICML.

[29]  Katia Sycara,et al.  Multiagent Compromise via Negotiation , 1989, Distributed Artificial Intelligence.

[30]  Milind Tambe,et al.  Towards Flexible Teamwork , 1997, J. Artif. Intell. Res..

[31]  Gregory D. Hager,et al.  Task-Directed Sensor Fusion and Planning , 1990 .

[32]  Sam Steel,et al.  Integrating Planning, Execution and Monitoring , 1988, AAAI.

[33]  Michael P. Georgeff,et al.  Communication and interaction in multi-agent planning , 1983, AAAI 1983.

[34]  John Yen,et al.  A Distributed Intelligent Agent Architecture for Simulating Aggregate-Level Behavior and Interactions on the Battlefield , 2001 .

[35]  Nicholas R. Jennings,et al.  Coordination in software agent systems , 1996 .

[36]  Michael J. Swain,et al.  Plan representations for picking up trash , 1995, Proceedings of 7th IEEE International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence.

[37]  Sarit Kraus,et al.  Coordination without Communication: Experimental Validation of Focal Point Techniques , 1997, ICMAS.

[38]  Hector J. Levesque,et al.  GOLOG: A Logic Programming Language for Dynamic Domains , 1997, J. Log. Program..

[39]  Reid G. Smith,et al.  The Contract Net Protocol: High-Level Communication and Control in a Distributed Problem Solver , 1980, IEEE Transactions on Computers.

[40]  Edmund H. Durfee,et al.  Using Partial Global Plans to Coordinate Distributed Problem Solvers , 1987, IJCAI.

[41]  Barbara Hayes-Roth,et al.  A Blackboard Architecture for Control , 1985, Artif. Intell..

[42]  Thomas R. Ioerger,et al.  A Formal Model of Responsibilities in Agent-Based Teamwork , 2001 .

[43]  Anand S. Rao,et al.  Modeling Rational Agents within a BDI-Architecture , 1997, KR.

[44]  Randall Davis,et al.  Negotiation as a Metaphor for Distributed Problem Solving , 1988, Artif. Intell..

[45]  Manuela M. Veloso,et al.  Task Decomposition, Dynamic Role Assignment, and Low-Bandwidth Communication for Real-Time Strategic Teamwork , 1999, Artif. Intell..

[46]  Randall Davis,et al.  Frameworks for Cooperation in Distributed Problem Solving , 1988, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics.

[47]  Randolph M. Jones,et al.  Automated Intelligent Pilots for Combat Flight Simulation , 1998, AI Mag..

[48]  C. E. SHANNON,et al.  A mathematical theory of communication , 1948, MOCO.

[49]  John Yen,et al.  CAST: Collaborative Agents for Simulating Teamwork , 2001, IJCAI.

[50]  Nicholas R. Jennings,et al.  Controlling Cooperative Problem Solving in Industrial Multi-Agent Systems Using Joint Intentions , 1995, Artif. Intell..

[51]  Krishna R. Pattipati,et al.  Mathematical models of team performance: A distributed decision-making approach. , 1992 .

[52]  Moshe Tennenholtz,et al.  Adaptive Load Balancing: A Study in Multi-Agent Learning , 1994, J. Artif. Intell. Res..

[53]  Gil Tidhar,et al.  Planned Team Activity , 1992, MAAMAW.