Simple Temporal Networks for Improvisational Teamwork
Malia Morgan, Julianna Schalkwyk, Huaxiaoyue Wang, Hannah Davalos, Ryan Martinez, Vibha Rohilla and James Boerkoel
Abstract: When communication between teammates is limited to observations of each other's actions, agents may need to improvise to stay coordinated. Unfortunately, current methods inadequately capture the uncertainty introduced by a lack of direct communication. This paper augments existing frameworks to introduce Simple Temporal Networks for Improvisational Teamwork (STN-IT)âa formulation that captures both the temporal dependencies and uncertainties between agents who need to coordinate but lack reliable communication. We define the notion of strong controllability for STN-ITs, which establishes a static scheduling strategy for controllable agents that produces a consistent team schedule, as long as non-communicative teammates act within known problem constraints. We provide both an exact and approximate approach for finding strongly controllable schedules, empirically demonstrate the trade-offs between these approaches on benchmarks of STN-ITs, and show analytically that the exact method is correct.
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