Much of my research into Agents, Service Provisioning and Service Selection has been oriented around the notion of teams of agents or services which work collaboratively to achieve some joint task or goal.  The work can be broadly categorised into work on provisioning and discovery of agent capabilities (aka services), and that on the formation of teams or coalitions to facilitate joint action.

The the notion of provisioning builds upon discovery, in as much as an agent or service is required with specific capabilities at a given time for a given cost.  Assuming that agents represent a finite, and typically non divisible resource, they cannot automatically be assumed to be available when tasked, but will determine autonomously whether they can provide the requested service at that time.  Thus, mechanisms such as those co-developed with Sebastian Stein or Mariusz Jacyno attempt to optimise (from a decentralised perspective) the allocation or selection of agents and their services based on the requirements of the requestors, or service consumers.

Riley, L., Atkinson, K., Dunne, P.E. and Payne T.R. (2016) A Synergy Coalition Group based Dynamic Programming Algorithm for Coalition Formation. In: The 15th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS2016) pp 588-596.

Riley, L., Atkinson, K., Dunne, P.E. and Payne T.R. (2015) Distributing Coalition Value Calculations to Coalition Members. In: The Twenty Ninth AAAI Conference (AAAI 2015), pp 2117-2123.

Riley, L., Atkinson, K., and Payne, T.R. (2012) A Dialogue Game for Coalition Structure Generation with Self-Interested Agents. COMMA - Fourth International Conference on Computational Models of Argument, pp229-236.

Riley, L., Atkinson, K., and Payne, T.R. (2012) Coalition Structure Generation for Self-Interested Agents in a Dialogue Game. Technical Report ULCS-12-004, Department of Computer Science, University of Liverpool.

Riley, L., Atkinson, K., Payne, T.R., and Black, E. (2011) An Implemented Dialogue System for Inquiry and Persuasion. First International Workshop on the Theory and Applications of Formal Argumentation (TAFA-11): pp 67-84.

Romero, M., Crowder, R., Sim, Y. W. and Payne, T. (2008) Applying Multi-Agent Systems to Organizational Modeling In Industrial Environments. In: 10th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems, 12-16 June 2008, Barcelona, Spain.

Crowder, R., Sim, Y. W., Payne, T., Robinson, M., Jackson, H. and Romero Ternero, M. (2008) An Approach to Modeling Integrated Product Teams. In: Proceedings of the ASME 2008 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering, 3-6 August 2008, New York.

Lewis, M., Sycara, K. and Payne, T. R. (2003) Agent Roles in Human Teams. In: AAMAS-03 Workshop on Humans and Multi-Agent Systems.

Payne, T. R., Paolucci, M., Singh, R. and Sycara, K. (2002) Communicating Agents in Open Multi Agent Systems. In: First GSFC/JPL Workshop on Radical Agent Concepts (WRAC), 16-18 January 2002, McLean, VA, USA.

Payne, T. R., Paolucci, M., Singh, R. and Sycara, K. (2002) Facilitating Message Exchange though Middle Agents. In: The First International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, July 15th - July 19th, Bologna, Italy.

Payne, T. R., Lenox, T. L., Hahn, S., Lewis, M. and Sycara, K. (2000) Agent-Based Team Aiding in a Time Critical Task. In: HICSS - Hawai'i International Conference on System Sciences.

Arai, S., Sycara, K. and Payne, T. R. (2000) Experience-based Reinforcement Learning to Acquire Effective Behavior in a Multiagent Domain. In: The Sixth Pacific Rim International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (PRICAI 2000).

Arai, S., Sycara, K. and Payne, T. R. (2000) Multi-agent Reinforcement learning for Planning and Scheduling Multiple Goals. In: The International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems (ICMAS2000).

Lenox, T. L., Hahn, S., Lewis, M., Payne, T. R. and Sycara, K. (2000) Task characteristics and Intelligent Aiding. In: 2000 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, October, Nashville, TN, USA.

Payne, T. R., Sycara, K., Lewis, M., Lenox, T. L. and Hahn, S. (2000) Varying the User Interaction within Multi-Agent Systems. In: The Fourth International Conference on Autonomous Agents.

Jacyno, M., Bullock, S., Geard, N., Payne T.R., and Luck, M. (2013) Self-organising agent communities for autonomic resource management. Adaptive Behaviour Journal. 21 (1), pp3-28.

Stein, S., Payne, T. and Jennings, N. (2011) Robust Execution of Service Workflows using Redundancy and Advance Reservations. IEEE Transactions on Services Computing. 4(2), 2012

Stein, S., Payne, T. R. and Jennings, N. R. (2009) Flexible Provisioning of Web Service Workflows. ACM Transactions on Internet Technology, 9 (1). 2:1-2:45.

Stein, S., Payne, T. R. and Jennings, N. R. (2009) Flexible Selection of Heterogeneous and Unreliable Services in Large-Scale Grids. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical & Engineering Sciences, 367 (1897). pp. 2483-2494.

Jacyno, M., Bullock, S., Luck, M. and Payne, T. R. (2009) Emergent Service Provisioning and Demand Estimation through Self-Organizing Agent Communities. In: The Eighth International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems. (AAMAS’09), pp 481-488.

Jacyno, M., Bullock, S., Payne, T. R., Geard, N. and Luck, M. (2008) Autonomic resource management through self-organising agent communities. In: Second IEEE International Conference on Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems, October 20-24, 2008, Venice, Italy.

Stein, S., Payne, T. R. and Jennings, N. R. (2008) Flexible QoS-Based Service Selection and Provisioning in Large-Scale Grids. In: UK e-Science 2008 All Hands Meeting (AHM), HPC Grids of Continental Scope, 8-11 September, Edinburgh.

Stein, S., Jennings, N. R. and Payne, T. (2008) Flexible Service Provisioning with Advance Agreements. In: Seventh International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS-08), 12-16 May 2008, Estoril, Portugal.

Stein, S., Jennings, N. R. and Payne, T. R. (2007) Provisioning Heterogeneous and Unreliable Providers for Service Workflows. In: 6th International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-agent Systems (AAMAS-07), May 14-18 2007, Hawaii, USA.

Stein, S., Jennings, N. R. and Payne, T. R. (2007) Provisioning Heterogeneous and Unreliable Providers for Service Workflows. In: Twenty-Second AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 22–26 July 2007, Vancouver, Canada.

Stein, S., Payne, T. R. and Jennings, N. R. (2007) Sensitivity Analysis of Flexible Provisioning. Technical Report ECSTR-IAM07-001, School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton.

Jacyno, M., Bullock, S., Luck, M. and Payne, T. (2007) Understanding decentralised control of resource allocation in a minimal multi-agent system. In: the 6th International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-agent Systems, 2007, Hawaii, USA.

Stein, S., Jennings, N. R. and Payne, T. R. (2006) Flexible Provisioning of Service Workflows. In: 17th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI-06), Aug 28th - Sept 1st, Riva del Garda, Italy.

Szomszor, M., Payne, T. R. and Moreau, L. (2006) Dynamic Discovery of Composable Type Adapters for Practical Web Services Workflow. In: UK e-Science All Hands Meeting 2006, September 2006, Nottingham, 2006.

Moreau, L., Luck, M., Miles, S., Papay, J., Decker, K. and Payne, T. (2004) Agents and the Grid: Service Discovery. In: Methodologies and Software Engineering for Agent Systems: The Agent-Oriented Software Engineering Handbook, Kluwer.

Papay, J., Miles, S., Luck, M., Moreau, L. and Payne, T. (2004) Principles of personalisation of service discovery. In: The UK OST e-Science second All Hands Meeting 2004 (AHM'04), September 2004, Nottingham, UK.

Lawley, R., Luck, M., Decker, K., Payne, T. R. and Moreau, L. (2003) Automated Negotiation Between Publishers and Consumers of Grid Notifications. Parallel Processing Letters, 13 (4). pp. 537-548. ISSN 0129-6264

Lawley, R., Decker, K., Luck, M., Payne, T. and Moreau, L. (2003) Automated Negotiation for Grid Notification Services. In: Ninth International Europar Conference (EURO-PAR'03), August, Klagenfurt, Austria.

Building teams of agents that work together is imperative when a goal cannot be completed by a single agent.  In this work we have looked at the use of coalition formation, agents within an industrial context, and within human teams, or used reinforcement learning to support the behaviour of agents.