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Autonomous coordination of multi-agent systems can improve the reaction and dispatching ability of multiple agents to emergency events. The existing research has mainly focused on the reactions or dispatching in specific scenarios. However, task-level coordination has not received significant attention. This study proposes a framework for autonomous switching of task-level strategies (ASTS), which can automatically switch strategies according to different scenarios in the task execution process. The framework is based on the blackboard system, which takes the form of an instance as an agent and the form of norm(s) as a strategy; it uses events to drive autonomous cooperation among multiple agents. A norm may be triggered when an event occurs. After the triggered norm is executed, it can change the data, state, and event in ASTS. To demonstrate the autonomy and switchability of the proposed framework, we develop a fire emergency reaction dispatch system. This system is applied to emergency scenarios involving fires. Five types of strategies and two control modes are designed for this system. Experiments show that this system can autonomously switch between different strategies and control modes in different scenarios with promising results. Our framework improves the adaptability and flexibility of multiple agents in an open environment and represents a solid step toward switching strategies at the task level.

This paper proposes a formalism for nonmonotonic reasoning based on prioritized argumentation. We argue that nonmonotonic reasoning in general can be viewed as selecting monotonic inferences by a simple notion of priority among inference rules. More importantly, these types of constrained inferences can be specified in a knowledge representation language where a theory consists of a collection of rules of first order formulas and a priority among these rules. We recast default reasoning as a form of prioritized argumentation and illustrate how the parameterized formulation of priority may be used to allow various extensions and modifications to default reasoning. We also show that it is possible, but more difficult, to express prioritized argumentation by default logic: Even some particular forms of prioritized argumentation cannot be represented modularly by defaults under the same language. Index Terms--Nonmonotonic reasoning, argumentation, priority, default logic, representability.