Towards collaborative task and team maintenance

Abstract

There is significant interest in modeling teamwork in agents. In recent years, it has become widely accepted that it is possible to separate teamwork from taskwork, providing support for domain-independent teamwork at an architectural level, using teamwork models. However, existing teamwork models (both in theory and practice) focus almost exclusively on achievement goals, and ignore maintenance goals, where the value of a proposition is to be maintained over time. Such maintenance goals exist both in taskwork (i.e., agents take actions to maintain a condition while a task is executing), as well as in teamwork (i.e., agents take actions to maintain the team). This paper presents mechanisms for collaborative maintenance in both taskwork and teamwork, allowing for flexible selection of the maintenance protocol. The mechanism is integrated and evaluated in two teamwork architectures for situated agent teams: DIESEL, an implemented teamwork and taskwork architecture, built on top of Soar, and BITE, an architecture for physical behavior-based robots. We provide details of these implementations, and the results from experiments demonstrating the benefits of support for collaborative maintenance processes, in several dynamic rich domains. We show that the use of collaborative maintenance leads to significant improvement in task performance in all domains.