Optimizing Team Composition Using Modeling and Multi Agent System Technology

Perceptronics Solutions, Inc. and the USC Computer Science Department, joined by consultants Dr. Eduardo Salas of the UCF Institute of Simulation Technology and Dr. Marvin Cohen of Cog-Tech, Inc, are pleased to present this proposal to develop an adaptive system that will automatically form and adaptively improve ‘optimal teams’ using behavioral data available from standard sources and brief questionnaires. The optimal teams will be formed to attack immediate problems of the parent organization and/or to address its long-duration missions. In other words, we will develop an automated system capable of: (1) Selecting new members to join an already formed problem or mission oriented team; (2) Composing an entirely new team to address a range of problem and/or missions; (3) Continually adapting the team composition in response to changes in the problem environment or in the team optimization conditions. We will focus our Phase I efforts on automatically adding members to an existing problem-oriented team in a dynamic military organization. This approach: (1) directly addresses the military application, which has high priority; and (2) will hold for less demanding applications such as more static military and non-military organizations, including companies, universities, etc.