Abstract world for opportunistic local decisions in multi-agent systems

Collaboration of multiple intelligent agents on a shared task is a complex research issue, made particularly difficult when communication is limited or impossible. A common solution in multi-agent systems is to commit a team of collaborating agents to a joint plan. Since any deviation from the plan by an agent is hazardous, the common treatment of potential unplanned opportunities is either by ignoring them (even when "opportunistic" actions increase the expected utility of the team), or by ad-hoc rules determining whether to accept such opportunities. Neither of these solutions is desirable. In our framework, Abstract World for Opportunistic Local decisions (AWOL for short), we attempt a disciplined treatment of opportunistic actions, in the context of an existing joint plan. The idea is to model the (stochastic) tradeoff of such opportunistic actions vs. continued commitment to the joint plan, while abstracting away as much as possible from the state of the world. The abstract model is evaluated using strict decision-theoretic criteria, with the goal of applying the optimal decision on whether to accept an opportunistic action in the original domain.