Teamwork in Multi-Agent Systems
A Formal Approach
Published on 21. April 2010
244 pages
978-0-470-66518-3 (ISBN)
Description
What makes teamwork tick?
Cooperation matters, in daily life and in complex applications.After all, many tasks need more than a single agent to beeffectively performed. Therefore, teamwork rules!
Teams are social groups of agents dedicated to the fulfilment ofparticular persistent tasks. In modern multiagent environments,heterogeneous teams often consist of autonomous software agents,various types of robots and human beings.
Teamwork in Multi-agent Systems: A Formal Approachexplains teamwork rules in terms of agents' attitudes and theircomplex interplay. It provides the first comprehensive logicaltheory, TeamLog, underpinning teamwork in dynamic environments. Theauthors justify design choices by showing TeamLog in action.
The book guides the reader through a fascinating discussion ofissues essential for teamwork to be successful:
* What is teamwork, and how can a logical view of it help indesigning teams of agents?
* What is the role of agents' awareness in an uncertain, dynamicenvironment?
* How does collective intention constitute a team?
* How are plan-based collective commitments related to teamaction?
* How can one tune collective commitment to the team'sorganizational structure and its communication abilities?
* What are the methodological underpinnings for teamwork in adynamic environment?
* How does a team and its attitudes adjust to changingcircumstances?
* How do collective intentions and collective commitments arisethrough dialogue?
* What is the computational complexity of TeamLog?
* How can one make TeamLog efficient in applications?
This book is an invaluable resource for researchers and graduatestudents in computer science and artificial intelligence as well asfor developers of multi-agent systems. Students and researchers inorganizational science, in particular those investigating teamwork,will also find this book insightful. Since the authors madean effort to introduce TeamLog as a conceptual model of teamwork,understanding most of the book requires solely a basic logicalbackground.
Reviews / Votes
"In sum, the prospective contribution of this book isexpected to have an impact on a number of aspects that revolvearound the modeling and simulation of teamwork, both from theoryand application issues. Therefore, I recommend it to researchers incomputer sciences, organization theory and social psychology whoare interested in collective thinking, collaborative work andorganizational phenomena, as well as to practitioners who dealeveryday with the challenge of managing teams in many differentsettings." (Journal of Artificial Societies and SocialSimulation, February 2011)More details
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Barbara Dunin-Keplicz | Rineke Verbrugge
Teamwork in Multi-Agent Systems A Formal Approach
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05/2010
Wiley
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Persons
Barbara Dunin-Keplicz is the head of the Multi-agent SystemsGroup at the Institute of Informatics of the Warsaw University andat the Institute of Computer Science of the Polish Academy ofSciences (ICS PAS). She was awarded a M.Sc. in 1976 from WarsawUniversity, PhD in 1990 from Jagiellonian University, and herhabilitation in 2004 from ICS PAS. Dunin-Keplicz was a visitingresearch fellow at the Department of Computer Science at the FreeUniversity of Amsterdam, 1994-1997, and at the Department ofArtificial Intelligence at the University of Groningen, from 1998.Her publications and research have been interdisciplinary. Startingfrom computational linguistics, reasoning about action and change,and formal theories of multiagent systems, including AgentCommunication Languages, she is now focused on foundations ofmultiagent systems, especially on the theory of motivationalattitudes in BDI systems.
Rineke Verbrugge is Associate Professor at the Universityof Groningen at the Institute of Artificial Intelligence, to whichshe has been affiliated from 1997. Since 2002, she has been leaderof the group Multi-agent Systems at the university, where her workfocused on logics in artificial intelligence, specificallymulti-agent systems, reasoning about others, and groupreasoning.
She received a M.Sc. (cum laude) in Mathematics in 1988 and a Ph.D.in Mathematics in 1993, both from the University of Amsterdam.Subsequently, she was post-doc at the Department of Logic at theCharles University in Prague (TEMPUS grant) and at the Departmentof Logic at the University of Gothenburg (NWO Talent stipend), aswell as Visiting Assistant Professor at the Department ofLinguistics and Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology (MIT). From 1995 to 1997, she was Assistant Professor atthe Department of Artificial Intelligence at the Vrije UniversiteitAmsterdam.
Content
About the Authors.
Foreword.
Preface.
1 Teamwork in Multi-Agent Environments.
1.1 Autonomous Agents.
1.2 Multi-Agent Environments as a Pinnacle ofInterdisciplinarity.
1.3 Why Teams of Agents?
1.4 The Many Flavors of Cooperation.
1.5 Agents with Beliefs, Goals and Intentions.
1.6 From Individuals to Groups.
1.7 Group Attitudes.
1.8 A Logical View on Teamwork: TEAMLOG.
1.9 Teamwork in Times of Change.
1.10 Our Agents are Planners.
1.11 Temporal or Dynamic?
1.12 From Real-World Data to Teamwork.
1.13 How Complex are Models of Teamwork?
2 Beliefs in Groups.
2.1 Awareness is a Vital Ingredient of Teamwork.
2.2 Perception and Beliefs.
2.3 Language and Models for Beliefs.
2.4 Axioms for Beliefs.
2.5 Axioms for Knowledge.
2.6 Relations between Knowledge and Belief.
2.7 Levels of Agents' Awareness.
3 Collective Intentions.
3.1 Intentions in Practical Reasoning.
3.2 Language and Models for Goals and Intentions.
3.3 Goals and Intentions of Individual Agents.
3.4 Collective Intention Constitutes a Group.
3.5 Definitions of Mutual and Collective Intentions.
3.6 Collective Intention as an Infinitary Concept.
3.7 Alternative Definitions.
3.8 The Logic of Mutual Intention TeamLogmint is Complete.
3.9 Related Approaches to Intentions in a Group.
4 A Tuning Machine for Collective Commitments.
4.1 Collective Commitment.
4.2 The Language and Kripke Semantics.
4.3 Building Collective Commitments.
4.4 Tuning Collective Commitments.
4.5 Different Notions of Collective Commitment.
4.6 Topologies and Group Commitments.
4.7 Summing up TeamLog: The Static Part of the Story.
5 Reconfiguration in a Dynamic Environment.
5.1 Dealing with Dynamics.
5.2 The Four Stages of Teamwork.
5.3 The Reconfiguration Method.
5.4 Case Study of Teamwork: Theorem Proving.
6 The Evolution of Commitments duringReconfiguration.
6.1 A Formal View on Commitment Change.
6.2 Individual Actions and Social Plan Expressions.
6.3 Kripke Models.
6.4 Dynamic Description of Teamwork.
6.5 Evolution of Commitments During Reconfiguration.
6.6 TeamLog Summary.
7 A Case Study in Environmental Disaster Management.
7.1 A Bridge from Theory to Practice.
7.2 The Case Study: Ecological Disasters.
7.3 Global Plans.
7.4 Adjusting the TeamLog Definitions to the Case Study.
7.5 Conclusion.
8 Dialogue in Teamwork.
8.1 Dialogue as a Synthesis of Three Formalisms.
8.2 Dialogue Theory and Dialogue Types.
8.3 Zooming in on Vital Aspects of Dialogue.
8.4 Information Seeking During Potential Recognition.
8.5 Persuasion During Team Formation.
8.6 Deliberation During Planning.
8.7 Dialogues During Team Action.
8.8 Discussion.
9 Complexity of Teamlog.
9.1 Computational Complexity.
9.2 Logical Background.
9.3 Complexity of TeamLogind.
9.4 Complexity of the System TeamLog.
9.5 Discussion and Conclusions.
A Appendix A.
A.1 Axiom Systems.
A.2 An Alternative Logical Framework for Dynamics of Teamwork:Computation Tree Logic.
Bibliography.
Index.
