Adaptive agent integration architectures for heterogeneous team members

Abstract

With the proliferation of software agents and smart hardware devices there is a growing realization that large-scale problems can be addressed by integration of such standalone systems. This has led to an increasing interest in integration architectures that enable a heterogeneous variety of agents and humans to work together. These agents and humans differ in their capabilities, preferences, the level of autonomy they are willing to grant the integration architecture and their information requirements and performance. The challenge in coordinating such a diverse agent set is that potentially a large number of domain-specific and agent specific coordination plans may be required. We present a novel two-tiered approach to address this coordination problem. We first provide the integration architecture with general purpose teamwork coordination capabilities, but then enable adaptation of such capabilities for the needs or requirements of specific individuals. A key novel aspect of this adaptation is that it takes place in the context of other heterogeneous team members. We are realizing this approach in an implemented distributed agent integration architecture called Teamcore. Experimental results from two different domains are presented.