Research in multi-agent systems has led to the development of many multi-agent control architectures. However, we believe that there is currently no known optimal structure for multi-agent control since the effectiveness of any particular architecture varies depending on the domain of the problem. Therefore, deployment of multi-agent teams would be significantly sped up by a development and deployment environment which would allow designers to easily modify the architecture. In this paper, we present a flexible team-oriented programming and execution architecture, MONAD, which integrates hierarchical behaviorbased control, multi-agent coordination mechanisms, and agenttask allocation services. MONAD uses a novel scripting language that allows designers to easily modify the team structure, behavior hierarchy, applicability conditions, and arbitration methods, in pursuit of the best solution for a particular problem. We have evaluated the MONAD architecture within a well-accepted advers...
Thuc Vu, Jared Go, Gal A. Kaminka, Manuela M. Velo