Distributed Deliberation on Direct Help in Agent Teamwork

This paper explores how the members of an agent team can jointly deliberate on providing direct help to each other with an intended benefit to team performance. By direct help we mean assistance between teammates that is initiated by them as need arises, rather than being imposed by the general organization of the team or by a centralized decision. The deliberation starts with a request for help in some approaches and with an offer of help in others; it is typically effected through a bidding protocol. We examine the existing principles and designs of help deliberation and propose a new protocol, which refines and combines two existing versions into one. The new protocol allows an agent to initiate help deliberation by either a request or an offer, and to simultaneously engage in both providing and receiving assistance. We demonstrate its potential performance gains over the previous versions through simulation experiments.