Coordinating Teams in Uncertain Environments: A Hybrid BDI-POMDP Approach

Distributed partially observable Markov decision problems (POMDPs) have emerged as a popular decision-theoretic approach for planning for multiagent teams, where it is imperative for the agents to be able to reason about the rewards (and costs) for their actions in the presence of uncertainty. However, finding the optimal distributed POMDP policy is computationally intractable (NEXPComplete). This paper is focussed on a principled way to combine the two dominant paradigms for building multiagent team plans, namely the “belief-desireintention” (BDI) approach and distributed POMDPs. In this hybrid BDI-POMDP approach, BDI team plans are exploited to improve distributed POMDP tractability and distributed POMDP-based analysis improves BDI team plan performance. Concretely, we focus on role allocation, a fundamental problem in BDI teams – which agents to allocate to the different roles in the team. The hybrid BDIPOMDP approach provides three key contributions. First, unlike prior work...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: PROMAS
• Authors: Ranjit Nair, Milind Tambe
• Keywords: Bdi Team, Bdi Team Plans, PROMAS 2004, Role Allocation