IMPLEMENTING AGENT TEAMS IN DYNAMIC MULTIAGENT ENVIRONMENTS

Teamwork is becoming increasingly critical in multiagent environments ranging from virtual environments for training and education, to infor mation integration of the internet, to potential multirobotic space mi ssions. Teamwork in such complex, dynamic environments is more than a simple union of simultaneous individual activity, even if supplemented with preplanned coordination. Indeed, in these dynamic environments, unanticipated events can easily cause a breakdown in such preplanned c oordination. The central hypothesis in this article is that for effect ive teamwork, agents should be provided explicit representation of tea m goals and plans, as well as an explicit representation of a model of teamwork to support the execution of team plans. In our work, this mo del of teamwork takes thr form of a set of domain independent rules th at clearly outline an agent's commitments and responsibilities as a pa rticipant in team activities, and thus guide the agent's social activi ties while executing team plans. This article describes two implementa tions of agent-teams based on the above principles, one for a real-wor ld helicopter combat simulation, and one for the RoboCup soccer simula tion. The article also provides a preliminary comparison of the two ag ent-teams to illustrate some of the strengths and weaknesses of RoboCu p as a common test bed for multiagent systems.