Toward Team-Oriented Programming

Abstract. The promise of agent-based systems is leading towards the development of autonomous, heterogeneous agents, designed by a variety of research/industrial groups and distributed over a variety of platforms and environments. Teamwork among these heterogeneous agents is critical in realizing the full potential of these systems and scaling up to the demands of large-scale applications. Unfortunately, development of robust, flexible agent teams is currently extremely difficult. This paper focuses on significantly accelerating the process of building such teams using a simplified, abstract framework called team-oriented programming (TOP). In TOP, a programmer specifies an agent organization hierarchy and the team tasks for the organization to perform, abstracting away from the innumerable coordination plans potentially necessary to ensure robust and flexible team operation. Our TEAMCORE system supports TOP through a distributed, domain-independent layer that integrates core tea...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1999
• Where: ATAL
• Authors: David V. Pynadath, Milind Tambe, Nicolas Chauvat, Lawrence Cavedon
• Keywords: ATAL 1999, Heterogeneous Agents, Heterogeneous Distributed Agents, Intelligent Agents, Team