Barbara Maria Dunin-Keplicz & Rineke Verbrugge 
Teamwork in Multi-Agent Systems [EPUB ebook] 
A Formal Approach

What makes teamwork tick?



Cooperation matters, in daily life and in complex applications.
After all, many tasks need more than a single agent to be
effectively performed. Therefore, teamwork rules!

Teams are social groups of agents dedicated to the fulfilment of
particular persistent tasks. In modern multiagent environments,
heterogeneous teams often consist of autonomous software agents,
various types of robots and human beings.

Teamwork in Multi-agent Systems: A Formal Approach
explains teamwork rules in terms of agents’ attitudes and their
complex interplay. It provides the first comprehensive logical
theory, Team Log, underpinning teamwork in dynamic environments. The
authors justify design choices by showing Team Log in action.

The book guides the reader through a fascinating discussion of
issues essential for teamwork to be successful:

* What is teamwork, and how can a logical view of it help in
designing teams of agents?

* What is the role of agents’ awareness in an uncertain, dynamic
environment?

* How does collective intention constitute a team?

* How are plan-based collective commitments related to team
action?

* How can one tune collective commitment to the team’s
organizational structure and its communication abilities?

* What are the methodological underpinnings for teamwork in a
dynamic environment?

* How does a team and its attitudes adjust to changing
circumstances?

* How do collective intentions and collective commitments arise
through dialogue?

* What is the computational complexity of Team Log?

* How can one make Team Log efficient in applications?

This book is an invaluable resource for researchers and graduate
students in computer science and artificial intelligence as well as
for developers of multi-agent systems. Students and researchers in
organizational science, in particular those investigating teamwork,
will also find this book insightful. Since the authors made
an effort to introduce Team Log as a conceptual model of teamwork,
understanding most of the book requires solely a basic logical
background.

Spis treści

About the Authors.

Foreword.

Preface.

1 Teamwork in Multi-Agent Environments.

1.1 Autonomous Agents.

1.2 Multi-Agent Environments as a Pinnacle of
Interdisciplinarity.

1.3 Why Teams of Agents?

1.4 The Many Flavors of Cooperation.

1.5 Agents with Beliefs, Goals and Intentions.

1.6 From Individuals to Groups.

1.7 Group Attitudes.

1.8 A Logical View on Teamwork: TEAMLOG.

1.9 Teamwork in Times of Change.

1.10 Our Agents are Planners.

1.11 Temporal or Dynamic?

1.12 From Real-World Data to Teamwork.

1.13 How Complex are Models of Teamwork?

2 Beliefs in Groups.

2.1 Awareness is a Vital Ingredient of Teamwork.

2.2 Perception and Beliefs.

2.3 Language and Models for Beliefs.

2.4 Axioms for Beliefs.

2.5 Axioms for Knowledge.

2.6 Relations between Knowledge and Belief.

2.7 Levels of Agents’ Awareness.

3 Collective Intentions.

3.1 Intentions in Practical Reasoning.

3.2 Language and Models for Goals and Intentions.

3.3 Goals and Intentions of Individual Agents.

3.4 Collective Intention Constitutes a Group.

3.5 Definitions of Mutual and Collective Intentions.

3.6 Collective Intention as an Infinitary Concept.

3.7 Alternative Definitions.

3.8 The Logic of Mutual Intention Team Logmint is Complete.

3.9 Related Approaches to Intentions in a Group.

4 A Tuning Machine for Collective Commitments.

4.1 Collective Commitment.

4.2 The Language and Kripke Semantics.

4.3 Building Collective Commitments.

4.4 Tuning Collective Commitments.

4.5 Different Notions of Collective Commitment.

4.6 Topologies and Group Commitments.

4.7 Summing up Team Log: The Static Part of the Story.

5 Reconfiguration in a Dynamic Environment.

5.1 Dealing with Dynamics.

5.2 The Four Stages of Teamwork.

5.3 The Reconfiguration Method.

5.4 Case Study of Teamwork: Theorem Proving.

6 The Evolution of Commitments during
Reconfiguration.

6.1 A Formal View on Commitment Change.

6.2 Individual Actions and Social Plan Expressions.

6.3 Kripke Models.

6.4 Dynamic Description of Teamwork.

6.5 Evolution of Commitments During Reconfiguration.

6.6 Team Log Summary.

7 A Case Study in Environmental Disaster Management.

7.1 A Bridge from Theory to Practice.

7.2 The Case Study: Ecological Disasters.

7.3 Global Plans.

7.4 Adjusting the Team Log Definitions to the Case Study.

7.5 Conclusion.

8 Dialogue in Teamwork.

8.1 Dialogue as a Synthesis of Three Formalisms.

8.2 Dialogue Theory and Dialogue Types.

8.3 Zooming in on Vital Aspects of Dialogue.

8.4 Information Seeking During Potential Recognition.

8.5 Persuasion During Team Formation.

8.6 Deliberation During Planning.

8.7 Dialogues During Team Action.

8.8 Discussion.

9 Complexity of Teamlog.

9.1 Computational Complexity.

9.2 Logical Background.

9.3 Complexity of Team Logind.

9.4 Complexity of the System Team Log.

9.5 Discussion and Conclusions.

A Appendix A.

A.1 Axiom Systems.

A.2 An Alternative Logical Framework for Dynamics of Teamwork:
Computation Tree Logic.

Bibliography.

Index.

O autorze

Barbara Dunin-Keplicz is the head of the Multi-agent Systems
Group at the Institute of Informatics of the Warsaw University and
at the Institute of Computer Science of the Polish Academy of
Sciences (ICS PAS). She was awarded a M.Sc. in 1976 from Warsaw
University, Ph D in 1990 from Jagiellonian University, and her
habilitation in 2004 from ICS PAS. Dunin-Keplicz was a visiting
research fellow at the Department of Computer Science at the Free
University of Amsterdam, 1994-1997, and at the Department of
Artificial Intelligence at the University of Groningen, from 1998.
Her publications and research have been interdisciplinary. Starting
from computational linguistics, reasoning about action and change,
and formal theories of multiagent systems, including Agent
Communication Languages, she is now focused on foundations of
multiagent systems, especially on the theory of motivational
attitudes in BDI systems.

Rineke Verbrugge is Associate Professor at the University
of Groningen at the Institute of Artificial Intelligence, to which
she has been affiliated from 1997. Since 2002, she has been leader
of the group Multi-agent Systems at the university, where her work
focused on logics in artificial intelligence, specifically
multi-agent systems, reasoning about others, and group
reasoning.

She received a M.Sc. (cum laude) in Mathematics in 1988 and a Ph.D.
in Mathematics in 1993, both from the University of Amsterdam.
Subsequently, she was post-doc at the Department of Logic at the
Charles University in Prague (TEMPUS grant) and at the Department
of Logic at the University of Gothenburg (NWO Talent stipend), as
well as Visiting Assistant Professor at the Department of
Linguistics and Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT). From 1995 to 1997, she was Assistant Professor at
the Department of Artificial Intelligence at the Vrije Universiteit
Amsterdam.