Reconfiguration in a Dynamic Environment
Barbara Dunin‐Kȩplicz, Rineke Verbrugge · 2010
A dynamic environment requires flexible behavior to ensure successful teamwork. This chapter isolates and analyses separately the three essential aspects of team cooperation and coordination in a distributed environment. These are construction, maintenance and realization of the type of collective commitments that optimally fit the application domain, the group structure and the situation. The chapter uses the generic notion of collective commitment C-COMMG, P, abstracting from any particular type of commitment. As reconfiguration amounts to intelligent replanning, it naturally focuses on a team’s social plan which is an obligatory element of any group commitment. The chapter presents a detailed introduction to the four stages of teamwork, including formal definitions of corresponding agent attitudes. Subsequently, the general ideas behind the author’s reconfiguration method are explained and the reconfiguration algorithm is presented. Finally, the algorithm is illustrated by an example application. Controlled Vocabulary Terms multi-agent systems; planning; team working