Towards flexible task & team maintenance

There is significant interest in modeling teamwork in synthetic 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 exclusive 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 DIESEL, an implemented teamwork and taskwork architecture, built on top of Soar, that addresses maintenance goals in situated agent teams. We provide details of DIESEL's structure, and initial experiments demonstrating it in operation in a dynamic rich domain. Copyright © 2006, American Association for Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved.