Paper Info
Title
The communicative multiagent team decision problem: analyzing teamwork theories and models
Abstract
Despite the significant progress in multiagent teamwork, existing research does not address the optimality of its prescriptions nor the complexity of the teamwork problem. Without a characterization of the optimality-complexity tradeoffs, it is impossible to determine whether the assumptions and approximations made by a particular theory gain enough efficiency to justify the losses in overall performance. To provide a tool for use by multiagent researchers in evaluating this tradeoff, we present a unified framework, the COMmunicative Multiagent Team Decision Problem (COM-MTDP). The COM-MTDP model combines and extends existing multiagent theories, such as decentralized partially observable Markov decision processes and economic team theory. In addition to their generality of representation, COM-MTDPs also support the analysis of both the optimality of team performance and the computational complexity of the agents' decision problem. In analyzing complexity, we present a breakdown of the computational complexity of constructing optimal teams under various classes of problem domains, along the dimensions of observability and communication cost. In analyzing optimality, we exploit the COM-MTDP's ability to encode existing teamwork theories and models to encode two instantiations of joint intentions theory taken from the literature. Furthermore, the COM-MTDP model provides a basis for the development of novel team coordination algorithms. We derive a domain-independent criterion for optimal communication and provide a comparative analysis of the two joint intentions instantiations with respect to this optimal policy. We have implemented a reusable, domain-independent software package based on COM-MTDPs to analyze teamwork coordination strategies, and we demonstrate its use by encoding and evaluating the two joint intentions strategies within an example domain.
Year
DOI
Venue
2011
10.1613/jair.1024
Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research
Keywords
DocType
Volume
communicative multiagent team decision,decision problem,economic team theory,com-mtdp model combine,teamwork problem,multiagent teamwork,teamwork theory,teamwork coordination strategy,com-mtdp model,computational complexity,existing research,comparative analysis,artificial intelligent
Journal
abs/1106.4569
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
1
Journal Of Artificial Intelligence Research, Volume 16, pages 389-423, 2002
125
PageRank 
References 
Authors
6.50
19
2
Search Limit
100125
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
David V. Pynadath11556130.56
Milind Tambe26008522.25