Team Oriented Programming and Proxy Agents: The Next Generation

Abstract

Coordination between large teams of highly heterogeneous entities will change the way complex goals are pursued in real world environments. One approach to achieving the required coordination in such teams is to give each team member a proxy that assumes routine coordination activities on behalf of its team member. Despite that approach's success, as we attempt to apply this first generation of proxy architecture to larger teams in more challenging environments some limitations become clear. In this paper, we present initial efforts on the next generation of Team Oriented Programming (TOP) and proxy archiecture, called Machinetta. Machinetta aims to overcome the limitations of the previous generation of proxies and allow effective coordination between very large teams of highly heterogeneous agents. We describe the principles underlying the design of the Machinetta proxies and present initial results from two domains.

Internet collaboration and service composition as a loose form of teamwork

“…The view of teamwork as proposed by Tambe and developed in STEAM [12], Teamcore [13] and most recently Machinetta [14] requires that team members are all operating with the same joint intentions. Implementations require that each team member has the same set of team plans, as well as needing to share all relevant beliefs with respect to the plan.…”

Notice of Violation of IEEE Publication Principles<BR>Achieving flexible task delegation in role-based agent teams

“…In ROPE (Role Oriented Programming Environment), invocation consists of passing an agent a role and an execution environment, and it is up to the agent to carry out the role in that context [1]. TOP (Team-Oriented Programming) focuses on defining the notions of joint team mental states [15,10,12], and OMNI (Organizational Model for Normative Institutions) define the social structures and interactions within a group of agents [6,17].…”

Teams in Multi-Agent Systems

“…The TEAMCORE [13] (and the more recent Machinetta [14]) implementation of TOP is implemented as wrappers or proxies for agents defined using the production system-based architecture Soar. TEAMCORE is an extension of STEAM [16].…”