Achieving Flexible Task Delegation in Role-Based Agent Teams
Yu Zhang · 2007
Teamwork has become increasingly important to many disciplines. In our opinion, an effective design of a teamwork language should be able to handle unexpected uncertainties and allow for the conceptual specification of teamwork knowledge for reuse. This paper introduces RoB-MALLET, a teamwork language based on the concepts of role and role variable. An important characteristic of our notion of role is that it includes the specific operations that an agent filling the role must perform in a specific setting as well as their ordering constraints. Taking this view on the definition of role has enabled us to present the responsibility of roles, to reason about the assignment of real agents to roles, and to achieve a certain level of plan reusability. Finally, we present several experiments that explore plan reusability of RoB-MALLET, show that it is flexible in supporting simultaneity of invocation and evaluate its efficiency in supporting teamwork.