Automatic generation of communication and teamwork within multi-agent teams

Abstract

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.