Publications

2002
D. V. Pynadath and Milind Tambe. 2002. “The communicative multiagent team decision problem: Analyzing teamwork theories and models .” Journal of AI Research (JAIR), 16, Pp. 389-423.Abstract
Despite the signicant 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 tradeos, it is impossible to determine whether the assumptions and approximations made by a particular theory gain enough eciency to justify the losses in overall performance. To provide a tool for use by multiagent researchers in evaluating this tradeo, we present a unied 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.
2002_14_teamcore_jair_compd.pdf
D. V. Pynadath and Milind Tambe. 2002. “Electric Elves: Adjustable autonomy in real-world multiagent environments .” In Socially Intelligent Agents creating relationships with computers and Robots. Kluwer Academic Publishers.Abstract
Through adjustable autonomy (AA), an agent can dynamically vary the degree to which it acts autonomously, allowing it to exploit human abilities to improve its performance, but without becoming overly dependent and intrusive. AA research is critical for successful deployment of agents to support important human activities. While most previous work has focused on individual agent-human interactions, this paper focuses on teams of agents operating in real-world human organizations, as well as the novel AA coordination challenge that arises when one agent’s inaction while waiting for a human response can lead to potential miscoordination. Our multi-agent AA framework, based on Markov decision processes, provides an adaptive model of users that reasons about the uncertainty, costs, and constraints of decisions. Our approach to AA has proven essential to the success of our deployed Electric Elves system that assists our research group in rescheduling meetings, choosing presenters, tracking people’s locations, and ordering meals.
2002_12_teamcore_pynadath_elves_aa.pdf
H. Chalupsky, Y. Gil, Craig Knoblock, K. Lerman, J. Oh, D. V. Pynadath, T. Russ, and Milind Tambe. 2002. “Electric Elves: Agent Technology for Supporting Human Organizations (longer version of IAAI'01 paper).” AI Magazine.Abstract
The operation of a human organization requires dozens of everyday tasks to ensure coherence in organizational activities, to monitor the status of such activities, to gather information relevant to the organization, to keep everyone in the organization informed, etc. Teams of software agents can aid humans in accomplishing these tasks, facilitating the organization’s coherent functioning and rapid response to crises, while reducing the burden on humans. Based on this vision, this paper reports on Electric Elves, a system that has been operational, 24/7, at our research institute since June 1, 2000. Tied to individual user workstations, fax machines, voice, mobile devices such as cell phones and palm pilots, Electric Elves has assisted us in routine tasks, such as rescheduling meetings, selecting presenters for research meetings, tracking people’s locations, organizing lunch meetings, etc. We discuss the underlying AI technologies that led to the success of Electric Elves, including technologies devoted to agenthuman interactions, agent coordination, accessing multiple heterogeneous information sources, dynamic assignment of organizational tasks, and deriving information about organization members. We also report the results of deploying Electric Elves in our own research organization.
2002_6_teamcore_aimag_elves.pdf
Hyuckchul Jung, Milind Tambe, Anthony Barrett, and Bradley Clement. 2002. “Enabling Efficient Conflict Resolution in Multiple Spacecraft Missions via DCSP .” In International NASA Workshop on Planning and Scheduling for Space.Abstract
While NASA is increasingly interested in multi-platform space missions, controlling such platforms via timed command sequences -- the current favored operations technique -- is unfortunately very difficult, and a key source of this complexity involves resolving conflicts to coordinate multiple spacecraft plans. We propose distributed constraint satisfaction (DCSP) techniques for automated coordination and conflict resolution of such multi-spacecraft plans. We introduce novel value ordering heuristics in DCSP to significantly improve the rate of conflict resolution convergence to meet the efficiency needs of multispacecraft missions. In addition, we introduce distributed POMDP (partially observable markov decision process) based techniques for DCSP convergence analysis, which facilitates automated selection of the most appropriate DCSP strategy for a given situation, and points the way to a new generation of analytical tools for analysis of DCSP and multi-agent systems in general.
2002_16_teamcore_nasa_ws02.pdf
H. Jung, Milind Tambe, A. Barrett, and B. Clement. 2002. “Enabling efficient conflict resolution in multiple spacecraft missions via DCSP .” In NASA workshop on planning and scheduling.Abstract
While NASA is increasingly interested in multi-platform space missions, controlling such platforms via timed command sequences -- the current favored operations technique -- is unfortunately very difficult, and a key source of this complexity involves resolving conflicts to coordinate multiple spacecraft plans. We propose distributed constraint satisfaction (DCSP) techniques for automated coordination and conflict resolution of such multi-spacecraft plans. We introduce novel value ordering heuristics in DCSP to significantly improve the rate of conflict resolution convergence to meet the efficiency needs of multispacecraft missions. In addition, we introduce distributed POMDP (partially observable markov decision process) based techniques for DCSP convergence analysis, which facilitates automated selection of the most appropriate DCSP strategy for a given situation, and points the way to a new generation of analytical tools for analysis of DCSP and multi-agent systems in general.
2002_5_teamcore_jung_nasa.pdf
Gal Kaminka, D. V. Pynadath, and Milind Tambe. 2002. “Monitoring teams by overhearing: A multiagent plan-recognition approach .” Journal of AI Research (JAIR, 17, Pp. 83-135.Abstract
Recent years are seeing an increasing need for on-line monitoring of teams of cooperating agents, e.g., for visualization, or performance tracking. However, in monitoring deployed teams, we often cannot rely on the agents to always communicate their state to the monitoring system. This paper presents a non-intrusive approach to monitoring by overhearing, where the monitored team's state is inferred (via plan-recognition) from team-members' routine communications, ex- changed as part of their coordinated task execution, and observed (overheard) by the monitoring system. Key challenges in this approach include the demanding run-time requirements of monitoring, the scarceness of observations (increasing monitoring uncertainty), and the need to scale-up monitoring to address potentially large teams. To address these, we present a set of complementary novel techniques, exploiting knowledge of the social structures and procedures in the monitored team: (i) an ecient probabilistic plan-recognition algorithm, well-suited for processing communications as observations; (ii) an approach to exploiting knowledge of the team's social behavior to predict future observations during execution (reducing monitoring uncertainty); and (iii) monitoring algorithms that trade expressivity for scalability, representing only certain useful monitoring hypotheses, but allowing for any number of agents and their dierent activities to be represented in a single coherent entity. We present an empirical evaluation of these techniques, in combination and apart, in monitoring a deployed team of agents, running on machines physically distributed across the country, and engaged in complex, dynamic task execution. We also compare the performance of these techniques to human expert and novice monitors, and show that the techniques presented are capable of monitoring at human-expert levels, despite the diculty of the task.
2002_4_teamcore_jair_overhearing.pdf
D. V. Pynadath and Milind Tambe. 2002. “Multiagent teamwork: Analyzing key teamwork theories and models.” In First Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems Conference (AAMAS).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. Thus, we cannot 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 evaluating this tradeoff, we present a unified framework, the COMmunicative Multiagent Team Decision Problem (COM-MTDP) model, which is general enough to subsume many existing models of multiagent systems. We analyze use the COM-MTDP model to provide a breakdown of the computational complexity of constructing optimal teams under problem domains divided along the dimensions of observability and communication cost. We then exploit the COM-MTDP’s ability to encode existing teamwork theories and models to encode two instantiations of joint intentions theory, including STEAM. We then derive a domain-independent criterion for optimal communication and provide a comparative analysis of the two joint intentions instantiations. We have implemented a reusable, domain-independent software package based 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.
2002_13_teamcore_aamas02.pdf
Ranjit Nair, T. Ito, Milind Tambe, and S. Marsella. 2002. “Task allocation in the RoboCup Rescue simulation domain: A short note .” In International Symposium on RoboCup (RoboCup'01).Abstract
We consider the problem of disaster mitigation in the RoboCup Rescue Simulation Environment [3] to be a task allocation problem where the tasks arrive dynamically and can change in intensity. These tasks can be performed by ambulance teams, re brigades and police forces with the help of an ambulance center, a re station and a police oce. However the agents don't get automatically notied of the tasks as soon as they arrive and hence it is necessary for the agents to explore the simulated world to discover new tasks and to notify other agents of these. In this paper we focus on the problem of task allocation. We have developed two approaches, a centralized combinatorial auction mechanism demonstrated at Agents-2001 and a distributed method which helped our agents nish third in RoboCup-Rescue 2001. With regard to task discovery, we use a greedy search method to explore the world{ agents count the number of times they have visited each node, and attempt to visit nodes that have been visited the least number of times.
2002_1_teamcore_rescue.pdf
D. V. Pynadath and Milind Tambe. 2002. “Team coordination among distributed agents: Analyzing key teamwork theories and models .” In AAAI Spring Symposium on Intelligent Distributed and Embedded Systems.Abstract
Multiagent research has made significant progress in constructing teams of distributed entities (e.g., robots, agents, embedded systems) that act autonomously in the pursuit of common goals. There now exist a variety of prescriptive theories, as well as implemented systems, that can specify good team behavior in different domains. However, each of these theories and systems addresses different aspects of the teamwork problem, and each does so in a different language. In this work, we seek to provide a unified framework that can capture all of the common aspects of the teamwork problem (e.g., heterogeneous, distributed entities, uncertain and dynamic environment), while still supporting analyses of both the optimality of team performance and the computational complexity of the agents’ decision problem. Our COMmunicative Multiagent Team Decision Problem (COM-MTDP) model provides such a framework for specifying and analyzing distributed teamwork. The COM-MTDP model is general enough to capture many existing models of multiagent systems, and we use this model to provide some comparative results of these theories. We also provide a breakdown of the computational complexity of constructing optimal teams under various classes of problem domains. We then use the COM-MTDP model to compare (both analytically and empirically) two specific coordination theories (joint intentions theory and STEAM) against optimal coordination, in terms of both performance and computational complexity.
2002_8_teamcore_springsymp_commtdp.pdf
Ranjit Nair, Milind Tambe, and S. Marsella. 2002. “Team formation for reformation .” In AAAI Spring Symposium on Intelligent Distributed and Embedded Systems.Abstract
The utility of the multi-agent team approach for coordination of distributed agents has been demonstrated in a number of large-scale systems for sensing and acting like sensor networks for real-time tracking of moving targets (Modi et al. 2001) and disaster rescue simulation domains, such as RoboCup Rescue Simulation Domain (Kitano et al. 1999; Tadokoro et al. 2000) These domains contain tasks that can be performed only by collaborative actions of the agents. Incomplete or incorrect knowledge owing to constrained sensing and uncertainty of the environment further motivate the need for these agents to explicitly work in teams. A key precursor to teamwork is team formation, the problem of how best to organize the agents into collaborating teams that perform the tasks that arise. For instance, in the disaster rescue simulation domain, injured civilians in a burning building may require teaming of two ambulances and three nearby fire-brigades to extinguish the fire and quickly rescue the civilians. If there are several such fires and injured civilians, the teams must be carefully formed to optimize performance. Our work in team formation focuses on dynamic, realtime environments, such as sensor networks (Modi et al. 2001) and RoboCup Rescue Simulation Domain (Kitano et al. 1999; Tadokoro et al. 2000). In such domains teams must be formed rapidly so tasks are performed within given deadlines, and teams must be reformed in response to the dynamic appearance or disappearance of tasks. The problems with the current team formation work for such dynamic real-time domains are two-fold: i) most team formation algorithms (Tidhar, Rao, & Sonenberg 1996; Hunsberger & Grosz 2000; Fatima & Wooldridge 2001; Horling, Benyo, & Lesser 2001; Modi et al. 2001) are static. In order to adapt to the changing environment the static algorithm would have to be run repeatedly, ii) Team formation has largely relied on experimental work, without any theoretical analysis of key properties of team formation algorithms, such as their worst-case complexity. This is especially important because of the real-time nature of the domains. In this paper we take initial steps to attack both these problems. As the tasks change and members of the team fail, the current team needs to evolve to handle the changes. In both the sensor network domain (Modi et al. 2001) and RoboCup. Rescue (Kitano et al. 1999; Tadokoro et al. 2000), each re-organization of the team requires time (e.g., fire-brigades may need to drive to a new location) and is hence expensive because of the need for quick response. Clearly, the current configuration of agents is relevant to how quickly and well they can be re-organized in the future. Each reorganization of the teams should be such that the resulting team is effective at performing the existing tasks but also flexible enough to adapt to new scenarios quickly. We refer to this reorganization of the team as ”Team Formation for Reformation”. In order to solve the “Team Formation for Reformation” problem, we present R-COM-MTDPs (Roles and Communication in a Markov Team Decision Process), a formal model based on communicating decentralized POMDPs, to address the above shortcomings. RCOM-MTDP significantly extends an earlier model called COM-MTDP (Pynadath & Tambe 2002), by making important additions of roles and agents’ local states, to more closely model current complex multiagent teams. Thus, RCOM-MTDP provides decentralized optimal policies to take up and change roles in a team (planning ahead to minimize reorganization costs), and to execute such roles. R-COM-MTDPs provide a general tool to analyze roletaking and role-executing policies in multiagent teams. We show that while generation of optimal policies in R-COMMTDPs is NEXP-complete, different communication and observability conditions significantly reduce such complexity. In this paper, we use the disaster rescue domain to motivate the “Team Formation for Reformation” problem. We present real world scenarios where such an approach would be useful and use the RoboCup Rescue Simulation Environment (Kitano et al. 1999; Tadokoro et al. 2000) to explain the working of our model.
2002_2_teamcore_r_com_mtdp_ss02.pdf
Ranjit Nair, Milind Tambe, and S. Marsella. 2002. “Team formation for reformation in multiagent domains like RoboCupRescue .” In International Symposium on RoboCup (RoboCup'02).Abstract
Team formation, i.e., allocating agents to roles within a team or subteams of a team, and the reorganization of a team upon team member failure or arrival of new tasks are critical aspects of teamwork. They are very important issues in RoboCupRescue where many tasks need to be done jointly. While empirical comparisons (e.g., in a competition setting as in RoboCup) are useful, we need a quantitative analysis beyond the competition | to understand the strengths and limitations of dierent approaches, and their tradeos as we scale up the domain or change domain properties. To this end, we need to provide complexityoptimality tradeos, which have been lacking not only in RoboCup but in the multiagent eld in general. To alleviate these diculties, this paper presents R-COM-MTDP, a formal model based on decentralized communicating POMDPs, where agents explicitly take on and change roles to (re)form teams. R-COM-MTDP signicantly extends an earlier COM-MTDP model, by introducing roles and local states to better model domains like RoboCupRescue where agents can take on dierent roles and each agent has a local state consisting of the ob jects in its vicinity. R-COM-MTDP tells us where the problem is highly intractable (NEXP-complete) and where it can be tractable (P-complete), and thus understand where algorithms may need to tradeo optimality and where they could strive for near optimal behaviors. R-COM-MTDP model could enable comparison of various team formation and reformation strategies | including the strategies used by our own teams that came in the top three in 2001 | in the RoboCup Rescue domain and beyond.
2002_7_teamcore_robo_cup_rescue2002.pdf
Paul Scerri, D. V. Pynadath, and Milind Tambe. 2002. “Towards adjustable autonomy for the real-world .” Journal of AI Research (JAIR), 17, Pp. 171-228.Abstract
Adjustable autonomy refers to entities dynamically varying their own autonomy, transferring decision-making control to other entities (typically agents transferring control to human users) in key situations. Determining whether and when such transfers-of-control should occur is arguably the fundamental research problem in adjustable autonomy. Previous work has investigated various approaches to addressing this problem but has often focused on individual agent-human interactions. Unfortunately, domains requiring collaboration between teams of agents and humans reveal two key shortcomings of these previous approaches. First, these approaches use rigid one-shot transfers of control that can result in unacceptable coordination failures in multiagent settings. Second, they ignore costs (e.g., in terms of time delays or eects on actions) to an agent's team due to such transfers-ofcontrol. To remedy these problems, this article presents a novel approach to adjustable autonomy, based on the notion of a transfer-of-control strategy. A transfer-of-control strategy consists of a conditional sequence of two types of actions: (i) actions to transfer decisionmaking control (e.g., from an agent to a user or vice versa) and (ii) actions to change an agent's pre-specied coordination constraints with team members, aimed at minimizing miscoordination costs. The goal is for high-quality individual decisions to be made with minimal disruption to the coordination of the team. We present a mathematical model of transfer-of-control strategies. The model guides and informs the operationalization of the strategies using Markov Decision Processes, which select an optimal strategy, given an uncertain environment and costs to the individuals and teams. The approach has been carefully evaluated, including via its use in a real-world, deployed multi-agent system that assists a research group in its daily activities.
2002_11_teamcore_jair_aa.pdf
Paul Scerri, D. V. Pynadath, and Milind Tambe. 2002. “Why the elf acted autonomously: Towards a theory of adjustable autonomy .” In First Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems Conference (AAMAS).Abstract
Adjustable autonomy refers to agents' dynamically varying their own autonomy, transferring decision making control to other entities (typically human users) in key situations. Determining whether and when such transfer of control must occur is arguably the fundamental research question in adjustable autonomy. Practical systems have made significant in-roads in answering this question and in providing high-level guidelines for transfer of control decisions. For instance, [11] report that Markov decision processes were successfully used in transfer of control decisions in a real-world multiagent system, but that use of C4.5 led to failures. Yet, an underlying theory of transfer of control, that would explain such successes or failures is missing. To take a step in building this theory, we introduce the notion of a transfer-of-control strategy, which potentially involves several transfer of control actions. A mathematical model based on this notion allows both analysis of previously reported implementations and guidance for the design of new implementations. The practical benefits of this model are illustrated in a dramatic simplification of an existing adjustable autonomy system.
2002_10_teamcore_aamas02_aa.pdf
2001
David V. Pynadath, Milind Tambe, and Gal A. Kaminka. 2001. “Adaptive infrastructures for agent integration .” In First International Workshop on Infrastructures for Scalable multi-agent systems, Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science.Abstract
With the proliferation of software agents and smart hardware devices there is a growing realization that large-scale problems can be addressed by integration of such stand-alone systems. This has led to an increasing interest in integration infrastructures that enable a heterogeneous variety of agents and humans to work together. In our work, this infrastructure has taken the form of an integration architecture called Teamcore. We have deployed Teamcore to facilitate/enable collaboration between different agents and humans that differ in their capabilities, preferences, the level of autonomy they are willing to grant the integration architecture, their information requirements and performance. This paper first provides a brief overview of the Teamcore architecture and its current applications. The paper then discusses some of the research challenges we have focused on. In particular, the Teamcore architecture is based on general purpose teamwork coordination capabilities. However, it is important for this architecture to adapt to meet the needs and requirements of specific individuals. We describe the different techniques of architectural adaptation, and present initial experimental results.
2001_11_teamcore_incs01.pdf
Milind Tambe, D. V. Pynadath, and Paul Scerri. 2001. “Adjustable Autonomy: A Response .” In Intelligent Agents VII Proceedings of the International workshop on Agents, theories, architectures and languages.Abstract
Gaining a fundamental understanding of adjustable autonomy (AA) is critical if we are to deploy multi-agent systems in support of critical human activities. Indeed, our recent work with intelligent agents in the “Electric Elves” (E-Elves) system has convinced us that AA is a critical part of any human collaboration software. In the following, we first briefly describe E-Elves, then discuss AA issues in E-Elves.
2001_8_teamcore_atal_panel.pdf
Paul Scerri, D. V. Pynadath, and Milind Tambe. 2001. “Adjustable autonomy in real-world multi-agent environments .” In International Conference on Autonomous Agents (Agents'01).Abstract
Through adjustable autonomy (AA), an agent can dynamically vary the degree to which it acts autonomously, allowing it to exploit human abilities to improve its performance, but without becoming overly dependent and intrusive in its human interaction. AA research is critical for successful deployment of multi-agent systems in support of important human activities. While most previous AA work has focused on individual agent-human interactions, this paper focuses on teams of agents operating in real-world human organizations. The need for agent teamwork and coordination in such environments introduces novel AA challenges. First, agents must be more judicious in asking for human intervention, because, although human input can prevent erroneous actions that have high team costs, one agent’s inaction while waiting for a human response can lead to potential miscoordination with the other agents in the team. Second, despite appropriate local decisions by individual agents, the overall team of agents can potentially make global decisions that are unacceptable to the human team. Third, the diversity in real-world human organizations requires that agents gradually learn individualized models of the human members, while still making reasonable decisions even before sufficient data are available. We address these challenges using a multi-agent AA framework based on an adaptive model of users (and teams) that reasons about the uncertainty, costs, and constraints of decisions at all levels of the team hierarchy, from the individual users to the overall human organization. We have implemented this framework through Markov decision processes, which are well suited to reason about the costs and uncertainty of individual and team actions. Our approach to AA has proven essential to the success of our deployed multi-agent Electric Elves system that assists our research group in rescheduling meetings, choosing presenters, tracking people’s locations, and ordering meals.
2001_10_teamcore_agents01_aa.pdf
H. Jung and Milind Tambe. 2001. “Argumentation as Distributed Constraint Satisfaction: Applications and Results .” In International Conference on Autonomous Agents (Agents'01).Abstract
Conflict resolution is a critical problem in distributed and collaborative multi-agent systems. Negotiation via argumentation (NVA), where agents provide explicit arguments or justifications for their proposals for resolving conflicts, is an effective approach to resolve conflicts. Indeed, we are applying argumentation in some realworld multi-agent applications. However, a key problem in such applications is that a well-understood computational model of argumentation is currently missing, making it difficult to investigate convergence and scalability of argumentation techniques, and to understand and characterize different collaborative NVA strategies in a principled manner. To alleviate these difficulties, we present distributed constraint satisfaction problem (DCSP) as a computational model for investigating NVA. We model argumentation as constraint propagation in DCSP. This model enables us to study convergence properties of argumentation, and formulate and experimentally compare 16 different NVA strategies with different levels of agent cooperativeness towards others. One surprising result from our experiments is that maximizing cooperativeness is not necessarily the best strategy even in a completely cooperative environment. The paper illustrates the usefulness of these results in applying NVA to multi-agent systems, as well as to DCSP systems in general.
2001_2_teamcore_agents01_argue.pdf
Pragnesh J. Modi, H. Jung, Milind Tambe, W. Shen, and S. Kulkarni. 2001. “A Dynamic Distributed Constraint Satisfaction Approach to Resource Allocation .” In International Conference on Principles and Practices of Constraint programming.Abstract
In distributed resource allocation a set of agents must assign their resources to a set of tasks. This problem arises in many real-world domains such as disaster rescue, hospital scheduling and the domain described in this paper: distributed sensor networks. Despite the variety of approaches proposed for distributed resource allocation, a systematic formalization of the problem and a general solution strategy are missing. This paper takes a step towards this goal by proposing a formalization of distributed resource allocation that represents both dynamic and distributed aspects of the problem and a general solution strategy that uses distributed constraint satisfaction techniques. This paper defines the notion of Dynamic Distributed Constraint Satisfaction Problem (DyDCSP) and proposes two generalized mappings from distributed resource allocation to DyDCSP, each proven to correctly perform resource allocation problems of specific difficulty and this theoretical result is verified in practice by an implementation on a real-world distributed sensor network
2001_5_teamcore_cp01.pdf
Pragnesh J. Modi, H. Jung, Milind Tambe, W. Shen, and S. Kulkarni. 2001. “Dynamic distributed resource allocation: A distributed constraint satisfaction approach .” In Intelligent Agents VIII Proceedings of the International workshop on Agents, theories, architectures and languages (ATAL'01).Abstract
In distributed resource allocation a set of agents must assign their resources to a set of tasks. This problem arises in many real-world domains such as distributed sensor networks, disaster rescue, hospital scheduling and others. Despite the variety of approaches proposed for distributed resource allocation, a systematic formalization of the problem, explaining the different sources of difficulties, and a formal explanation of the strengths and limitations of key approaches is missing. We take a step towards this goal by proposing a formalization of distributed resource allocation that represents both dynamic and distributed aspects of the problem. We define four categories of difficulties of the problem. To address this formalized problem, the paper defines the notion of Dynamic Distributed Constraint Satisfaction Problem (DDCSP). The central contribution of the paper is a generalized mapping from distributed resource allocation to DDCSP. This mapping is proven to correctly perform resource allocation problems of specific difficulty. This theoretical result is verified in practice by an implementation on a real-world distributed sensor network.
2001_6_teamcore_atal01.pdf
H. Chalupsky, Y. Gil, Craig Knoblock, K. Lerman, J. Oh, D. V. Pynadath, T. Russ, and Milind Tambe. 2001. “Electric Elves: Applying Agent Technology to Support Human Organizations .” In International Conference on Innovative Applications of AI (IAAI'01).Abstract
The operation of a human organization requires dozens of everyday tasks to ensure coherence in organizational activities, to monitor the status of such activities, to gather information relevant to the organization, to keep everyone in the organization informed, etc. Teams of software agents can aid humans in accomplishing these tasks, facilitating the organization’s coherent functioning and rapid response to crises, while reducing the burden on humans. Based on this vision, this paper reports on Electric Elves, a system that has been operational, 24/7, at our research institute since June 1, 2000. Tied to individual user workstations, fax machines, voice, mobile devices such as cell phones and palm pilots, Electric Elves has assisted us in routine tasks, such as rescheduling meetings, selecting presenters for research meetings, tracking people’s locations, organizing lunch meetings, etc. We discuss the underlying AI technologies that led to the success of Electric Elves, including technologies devoted to agenthuman interactions, agent coordination, accessing multiple heterogeneous information sources, dynamic assignment of organizational tasks, and deriving information about organization members. We also report the results of deploying Electric Elves in our own research organization.
2001_1_teamcore_iaai01.pdf

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