Team Oriented Programming and Proxy Agents: The Next Generation

Coordination between large teams of highly heterogeneous entities will change the way complex goals are pursued in real world environments. One approach to achieving the required coordination in such teams is to give each team member a proxy that assumes routine coordination activities on behalf of its team member. Despite that approach’s success, as we attempt to apply this first generation of proxy architecture to larger teams in more challenging environments, some limitations become clear. In this paper, we present initial efforts on the next generation of proxy architecture and Team Oriented Programming (TOP), called Machinetta. Machinetta aims to overcome the limitations of the previous generation of proxies and allow effective coordination between very large teams of highly heterogeneous agents. We describe the principles underlying the design of the Machinetta proxies and present initial results from two domains.