Towards Flexible Teamwork in Persistent Teams

Teamwork is a critical capability in multi agent envi ronments Many such environments mandate that the agents and agent teams must be persistent i e exist over long periods of time Agents in such persistent teams are bound together by their long term common interests and goals This paper focuses on exible teamwork in such per sistent teams Unfortunately while previous work has investigated exible teamwork persistent teams remain unexplored For exible tamwork one promising ap proach that has emerged is model based i e providing agents with general models of teamwork that explicitly specify their commitments in teamwork Such models enable agents to autonomously reason about coordina tion Unfortunately for persistent teams such mod els may lead to coordination and communication ac tions that while locally optimal are highly problematic for the team s long term goals We present a decision theoretic technique to enable persistent teams to over come such limitations of the model based approach In particular agents reason about expected team utilities of future team states that are projected to result from actions recommended by the teamwork model as well as lower cost or higher cost variations on these actions To accomodate real time constraints this reasoning is done in an any time fashion Implemented examples from an analytic search tree and some real world do mains are presented