An ideal team is more than a team of ideal agents

Abstract

The problem of building a team to perform a complex task is often more than an optimal assignment of subtasks to agents based on individual performances. Subtasks may have subtle dependencies and relations that affect the overall performance of the formed team. This paper investigates the dependencies between subtasks and introduces some desired qualities of teams, such as preserving privacy or fairness. It proposes algorithms to analyze and build teams by taking into account the dependencies of assigned subtasks and agent performances. The performance of the algorithms are evaluated experimentally based on a multiagent system that is developed to answer complex queries. We show that by improving an initial team iteratively, the algorithm obtains teams with higher performance.