Game theoretic approach to cooperative teaming and tasking in the presence of an adversary

Cooperative teaming and tasking is a critical issue in the optimization and control of dynamic multi-agent systems. For most such systems, cooperative teaming and optimal task assignment can improve the overall performance. When an adversarial entity is present, however, it is not clear that cooperative teaming will always yield a justifiable superior outcome. Depending on the strategy adopted by the adversary, the change in the outcome may be insignificant whether the agents are grouped into teams or whether they all operate in unison as one team. In order to test these concepts, we will consider a recently developed model of a military operation between two forces: an attacking force and a defending force. In this paper, the effects of cooperative teaming and task assignment with respect to different arrangement of strength of the attacking force are investigated. The Nash strategy is used as the basis for determining the optimal controls for both sides. Using simulation of various scenarios, we show that an appropriate teaming and task assignment of the attacking force can reduce the losses it incurs. Our simulation results reveal that when the attacking force is made stronger, the difference between two options of teaming and non-teaming becomes less evident.