A Group-Oriented Framework for Coalitions

Coalitions exemplify the fundamental challenge of inducing coherent group behavior from individualistic agent structures. The Collective-Agents (CA) framework rejects the distinction between individual and group deliberation, on a functional basis. Acknowledging that a group does not think using a brain, and an individual brain is not divisible into multiple minds, the CA framework nevertheless seeks an analogous correspondence between the intentional attitudes of individuals and groups alike. Resulting agents are extremely elegant, allowing hierarchical decomposition of coalitions into sub-groups and providing savings in communication costs. More importantly, such principles allow the use of abstract software wrappers for transferring advances in individual planning, control, and scheduling directly to a group setting. After formalizing the framework, we will demonstrate such claims in principle and in an implemented system.