One approach to task decomposition in the soccer server is to assign
fixed positions to agents.
Such an
approach leads to several problems: i) short-term inflexibility in
that the players cannot adapt their positions to the ball's location
on the field; ii) long-term inflexibility in that the team cannot
adapt to opponent strategy; and iii) local inefficiency in that
players often get tired running across the field back to their
positions after chasing the ball. Our formations allow for flexible
teamwork and combat these problems. (As the term ``position'' is
often used to denote the concept of ``role'' in the soccer domain, in
this section we use the two terms interchangeably.)
This section describes the CMUnited-97 simulator team implementation of the teamwork structure presented in Section 4. In the context of the team member agent architecture in Section 3, it covers the locker-room agreement, the internal behaviors, and the internal state.