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International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages

ATAL 1999: Intelligent Agents VI. Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages pp 233–247Cite as

Toward Team-Oriented Programming

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 1757))

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 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.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Information Sciences Institute and Computer Science Department, University of Southern California, 4676 Admiralty Way, Marina del Rey, CA, 90292, USA

    David V. Pynadath, Milind Tambe, Nicolas Chauvat & Lawrence Cavedon

Authors
  1. David V. Pynadath
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  2. Milind Tambe
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  3. Nicolas Chauvat
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  4. Lawrence Cavedon
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, SO17 1BJ, Southampton, UK

    Nicholas R. Jennings

  2. Department of Computer Science, York University , M3J 1P3, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Yves Lespérance

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© 2000 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Pynadath, D.V., Tambe, M., Chauvat, N., Cavedon, L. (2000). Toward Team-Oriented Programming. In: Jennings, N.R., Lespérance, Y. (eds) Intelligent Agents VI. Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages. ATAL 1999. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 1757. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/10719619_17

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/10719619_17

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-67200-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-46467-9

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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