Autonomous Negotiating Teams
Program eBook

The goal of Autonomous Negotiating Teams is to autonomously negotiate the assignment and customization of resources, such as weapons, to tasks, such as moving targets. To do this we must enable designers to build systems that operate effectively in highly decentralized environments, making maximum use of local information, providing solutions that are both good enough, and soon enough. These systems will have components that communicate effectively with local peers, and also with information and command concentrators at higher levels of situation abstraction. They will explicitly represent goals, values, and assessments of likelihood and assurance, and reason about those quantities and qualities in order to accomplish their mission. ANTs systems will scale to much larger problem sizes by making maximum use of localized, rather than global information, and by explicitly making decision theoretic trade-offs with explicit time-bounds on calculation of actions. This new technology will enable us to build systems that are designed to utilize, at the application level, all the distributed, networked computational resources (hardware, operating systems, and communication) that have been developed over the past two decades. These advantages will be demonstrated first, and primarily, in the context of a logistics challenge problem. In addition, they will be demonstrated in a dynamic planning application, and a defensive (reactive) weapons control challenge problem, in the area of electronic warfare and electronic countermeasures. In each challenge, ANTs will be especially effective in cooperative action, since the process of matching tasks and resources is naturally decentralized in the ANTs approach.

Editors

Alejandro Bugacov

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www Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California

Stephen Fitzpatrick

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www Kestrel Institute

Gabor Karsai

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www Institute for Software-Integrated Systems, Vanderbilt University

Victor Lesser

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www University of Massachusetts

H. Van Dyke Parunak

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www Altarum

Vijay Raghavan, www, DARPA

Bart Selman,

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www Cornell University

Pedro Szekely

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www Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California

Table of Contents

1. Introduction by Program Managers

2. Problem Definitions

3. Modeling Tools and Techniques

4. Reusable Software

 


November 2003