A Formal Graphical Language of Interdependence in Teamwork
Changyun Wei, Koen V. Hindriks, M. Birna van Riemsdijk, Catholijn M. Jonker · IEEE Intelligent Systems · 2019
Agents in teamwork may be highly interdependent on each other, and the awareness of interdependences is an important requirement for designing and consequently implementing a multiagent system. In this article, we propose a formal graphical and domain-independent language that can facilitate the identification of comprehensive interdependences among the agents in teamwork. Moreover, a formal semantics is also introduced to precisely express and explain the properties of a graphical structure. The novel feature of the graphical language is that it complements the Interdependence Analysis Color Scheme in a way that explicitly models negative influences and, in addition, provides a visual-communication aid for developers. To demonstrate the applicability and sufficiency of the graphical language in a variety of domains, our case studies include a multirobot scenario and a human-robot scenario.