An approach to mixed-initiative management of heterogeneous software agent teams

The rapid growth in research and development of agent-based software systems has led to concerns about how human users will control the activities of teams of agents that must actively collaborate. We believe that practical multi-agent systems developed will often be comprised of small teams of heterogeneous agents, under direct supervision by users acting as "team leaders". We are now developing an environment for investigating approaches to controlling small to medium-sized groups of agents as coordinated teams. This environment will be used to explore mixed-initiative approaches to planning for the activities of agent teams and managing them during execution. Our approach arises out of a long-standing interest in mixed-initiative planning systems. In this paper, we discuss our approach to mixed-initiative agent team management, some representational issues involved in identifying compatible agent team members and the capabilities needed to monitor team execution.