Team Formation for Reformation

The utility of the multi-agent team approach for coordination of distributed agents has been demonstrated in a number of large-scale systems for sensing and acting like sensor networks for real-time tracking of moving targets (Modi et al. 2001) and disaster rescue simulation domains, such as RoboCup Rescue Simulation Domain (Kitano et al. 1999; Tadokoro et al. 2000) These domains contain tasks that can be performed only by collaborative actions of the agents. Incomplete or incorrect knowledge owing to constrained sensing and uncertainty of the environment further motivate the need for these agents to explicitly work in teams. A key precursor to teamwork is team formation, the problem of how best to organize the agents into collaborating teams that perform the tasks that arise. For instance, in the disaster rescue simulation domain, injured civilians in a burning building may require teaming of two ambulances and three nearby fire-brigades to extinguish the fire and quickly rescue the civilians. If there are several such fires and injured civilians, the teams must be carefully formed to optimize perfor-