Towards 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. Indeed, to succeed in highly uncertain, complex applications, the agent teams must be both robust and exible. Unfortunately, development of such agent teams is currently extremely dicult. This paper focuses on signicantly accelerating the process of building such teams using a simplied, abstract framework called team-oriented programming (TOP). In TOP, a programmer species an agent organization hierarchy and the team tasks for the organization to perform, but abstracts away from the large number of coordination plans potentially necessary to ensure robust and exible team operation. We support TOP through a distributed, domain-independent teamwork layer that integrates core teamwork coordination and communication capabilities. We have recently used TOP to integrate a diverse team of heterogeneous distributed agents in performing a complex task. We outline the current state of our TOP implementation and the outstanding issues in developing such a framework.