Towards flexible coordination of large scale multi-agent teams

Abstract

As a paradigm for coordinating cooperative agents in dynamic environments, teamwork has been shown to be capable of leading to flexible and robust behavior. However, when teamwork is applied to the problem of building teams with hundreds of members, its previously existing, fundamental limitations become apparent. In this paper, we address the limitations of existing models as they apply to very large agent teams. We develop algorithms aimed at flexible and efficient coordination, applying a decentralized social network topology for team organization and the abstract coordination behaviors of Team Oriented Plans (TOPs). From this basis, we present a model to organize a team into dynamically evolving subteams, in order to flexibly coordinate the team. Additionally, we put forward a novel approach to sharing information within large teams, which provides for targeted, efficient information delivery with a localized reasoning process model built on previously incoming information. We have developed domain-independent software proxies, with which we demonstrate teams of an order of magnitude larger than those previously discussed in known published work. We implement the results of our approach, demonstrating its ability to handle the challenges of coordinating large agent teams. © 2006 Springer Science+Business Media, Inc.