Automated adaptation of strategic guidance in multiagent coordination

Abstract

We address multi-agent planning problems in dynamic environments motivated by assisting human teams in disaster emergency response. It is challenging because most goals are revealed during execution, where uncertainty in the duration and outcome of actions plays a significant role, and where unexpected events can cause large disruptions to existing plans. The key to our approach is giving human planners a rich strategy language to constrain the assignment of agents to goals and allow the system to instantiate the strategy during execution, tuning the assignment to the evolving execution state. Our approach outperformed an extensively-trained team coordinating with radios and a traditional command-center organization, and an agent-assisted team using a different approach. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.