From Roles to Teamwork: A Framework and Architecture

Teamwork requires organization, strategies and coordination. The design of a multi-agent system should support these conceptual properties for constructing eeective teams. The advantages of a teamwork approach is the reduction in complexity of the task through distribution of responsibilities, resulting in better utilization of resources, robust behaviors, and a greater variety of behaviors against competitors. In this paper, a framework for building teams of responsible agents using roles, responsibilities and strategies is described. Its application to the domain of soccer is used to design a high performance team of soccer agents. The architecture for these agents utilizes a reactive planning system with support for teamwork. The team of soccer agents will be tested in a series of competitions against other teams in the real-time soccer simulator proposed for Robocup'97 which provides an uncertain, resource bounded world.