A mutual assistance protocol for agent teamwork.

This thesis proposes a novel protocol for incorporating helpful behavior into multiagent teamwork. In the proposed protocol, call the Mutual Assistance Protocol (MAP), an agent can use its own abilities and resources to advance a subtask assigned to another agent. The helpful act is performed only when the two agents jointly determine that it is in the interest of the team. The underlying design principle is that each agent assesses the team impact of changes in its own local plan. The distributed decision is reached through a bidding sequence similar to the Contract Net Protocol. The helpful act may consist in performing an action or in granting resources. The advantages of MAP over protocols that use unilateral help decisions are demonstrated through simulation experiments, using varying levels of mutual awareness in the team, dynamic disturbance in the environment, communication costs, and computation costs. --P. ii.