THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES SCHOOL OF COMPUTER SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING Minimal Infrastructure Support for Teams

Building a group of agents which can work effectively as a team is more than just merely putting individual agents together. Agents working in a team require the abilities to plan, communicate and coordinate with one another. Furthermore, systems in which agents are simply equipped with precomputed coordination plans will fail to work in complex, dynamic environments. Thus it is extremely difficult to design and build a system of collaborative agents from the scratch. This thesis describes MIST, a SharedPlans framework for team-based applications. MIST is based on SharedPlans but is further extended to deal with computational issues which are not directly addressed by SharedPlans. MIST is also striving towards a flexible, general framework which could reduce the implementation effort of developing practical applications.