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Conflicts in teamwork: hybrids to the rescue

Published: 25 July 2005 Publication History

Abstract

Today within the AAMAS community, we see at least four competing approaches to building multiagent systems: belief-desire-intention (BDI), distributed constraint optimization (DCOP), distributed POMDPs, and auctions or game-theoretic approaches. While there is exciting progress within each approach, there is a lack of cross-cutting research. This paper highlights hybrid approaches for multiagent teamwork. In particular, for the past decade, the TEAMCORE research group has focused on building agent teams in complex, dynamic domains. While our early work was inspired by BDI, we will present an overview of recent research that uses DCOPs and distributed POMDPs in building agent teams. While DCOP and distributed POMDP algorithms provide promising results, hybrid approaches help us address problems of scalability and expressiveness. For example, in the BDI-POMDP hybrid approach, BDI team plans are exploited to improve POMDP tractability, and POMDPs improve BDI team plan performance. We present some recent results from applying this approach in a Disaster Rescue simulation domain being developed with help from the Los Angeles Fire Department.

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cover image ACM Conferences
AAMAS '05: Proceedings of the fourth international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems
July 2005
1407 pages
ISBN:1595930930
DOI:10.1145/1082473
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 25 July 2005

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Author Tags

  1. BDI
  2. DCOP
  3. POMDP
  4. game theory

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  • (2016)Combining reward shaping and hierarchies for scaling to large multiagent systemsThe Knowledge Engineering Review10.1017/S026988891500015631:1(3-18)Online publication date: 11-Feb-2016
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