A complete teamwork model in a dynamic environment

Abstract

A team is a task-oriented group, its behavior is constrained to eliminate actions that are not essential to task achievement. The differences of individual beliefs, intentions and plans cannot be accomplished, yet team demands that these different insights be combined or integrated such that agents act as one. The central hypothesis in this paper is that for effective teamwork, agents should be provided explicit time lines and an underlying model of teamwork based on a concept of team knowledge. The model also emphasizes on the team agent architecture that contains multiple level belief modules (team, group, society, and individual beliefs) as its core to allow robust and coherent team behavior. The application and implementation of this model to a virtual fire-fighting domain has revealed a promising prospect in developing team agents. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2000.