Towards an Architecture and Theory for Agent Coordination

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This research involves the development of a domain independent approach to real-time, distributed coordination of multiple agents. It is based on the GeneralizedPartial Global Planning (GPGP) approach which views coordination as modulating local control, not replacing it. This process occurs via a set of domain-independent coordination mechanisms associated with each agent that posts constraints to the local real-time scheduler about the importance of certain tasks and appropriate times for their initiation and completion. Each coordination mechanism is defined as a response to certain features in the current task environment. In order to construct a generic approach to coordination, it is necessary to have an underlying framework that can represent the wide diversity of tasks, task properties, and task relationships in order to arrive at effective coordination among the activities of different agents in a wide variety of domains. The framework is called TAEMS (Task Analysis, Environment Modeling, and Simulation). It is a framework with which to represent the important aspects of complex computational task environments that is compatible with both formal agent-centered approaches and experimental approaches. The result of this research will lead to the development of a generic coordination module which can help desiginers of multiagent systems to build coordination strategies.