Challenges for multi-agent coordination theory based on empirical observations

Significant research progress and understanding about the nature of coordination has been made over the years. Development of the DCOP and DEC-MDP frameworks in the past decade has been especially important. Although these advances are very important for multi-agent coordination theory, they overlook a set of coordination behaviors and phenomena that have been observed empirically by many researchers since the early years of the field. The goal of this paper is to challenge researchers in multi-agent coordination to develop a comprehensive formal framework that explains these empirical observations.