Performance and Attention in Multi-Agent Tasks

A well designed cooperation strategy for a task oriented multi-agent team is important as it can improve performance. A challenging research issue in cooperation concerns the extent to which an agent should pay attention to the actions and e ects of other agents. In this paper, we address this issue in the context of an object search team. We rst propose the concept of an activity window which captures an agent's view of the activities and e ects of the team. Then we pinpoint some criteria that can be used to determine whether it is bene cial for an agent to put an action of the team into its window. Finally, we present experimental results to test these criteria.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1998
• Where: CRW
• Authors: Yiming Ye
• Keywords: Challenging Research Issue, CRW 1998, Multi-agent Team, Object Search Team, Robotics