Teamwork in Real-world, Dynamic Environments

Flexible teamwork in real-world multi-agent domains is more than a union of agents’ simultaneous execution of individual plans, even if such execution pre-coordinated. Indeed, uncertainties in complex, dynamic domains often obstruct pre-planned coordination, with a resultant breakdown in teamwork. The central hypothesis in this paper is that for durable teamwork, agents should be provided explicit team plans and an underlying model of teamwork that explicitly outlines their commitments and responsibilities as participants in team activities. Such a model enables team members to flexibly reason about coordination activities. The underlying model we have provided is based on the joint intentions framework; although we present some key modifications to reflect the practical constraints in (some) real-world domains. This framework has been implemented in the context of a real-world synthetic environment for helicopter-combat simulation; some empirical results are presented.1 1This research was supported as part of contract N66001-95-C-6013 from ARPA/ISO. Domain expertise was provided by Dave Sullivan of BMH Inc. I thank Ramesh Patil, Wei-Min Shen and Takahira Yamaguchi for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.