The Intentions of Teams: Team Structure, Endodeixis, and Exodeixis

Teams arise in a number of important multiagent applications. Several theories of intentions for teams have been proposed. By and large, these theories tend to model team intentions exclusively on the basis of mental concepts, and fail to acknowledge the internal structure of teams. We present a formal theory of intentions for teams that considers the structure of teams explicitly. In this context, we distinguish between exodeictic and endodeictic intentions, which are conceptualized as pointing outward or inward from a team. These concepts are formalized in a framework that models the structure of teams in terms of their members’ commitments and coordination requirements. In this way, our approach combines mental and social concepts in a principled manner. We describe some postulates concerning intentions and structure, and give technical results establishing or falsifying these postulates with different definitions.