Plan-Coordination Mechanisms and the Price of Autonomy

Abstract. Task-based planning problems for multi-agent systems require multiple agents to find a joint plan for a constrained set of tasks. Typically, each agent receives a subset of tasks to complete. Due to task interdependencies, such task allocations induce interdependencies between agents as well. These interdependencies will prevent the agents from making a plan for their subset of tasks independently from each other, since the combination of such autonomously constructed plans will most probably result in conflicting plans. Therefore, a plan-coordination mechanism is needed to guarantee a conflict-free globally feasible plan. In this paper, we first present a brief overview of the main results achieved on plan coordination for autonomous planning agents, distinguishing between problems associated with deciding whether a coordination mechanism is necessary, designing an arbitrary coordination mechanism, and designing an optimal (minimal) coordination mechanism. After finding...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: CLIMA
• Authors: J. Renze Steenhuisen, Cees Witteveen, Yingqian Zhang
• Keywords: Arbitrary Coordination Mechanism, CLIMA 2007, Coordination Mechanisms, Intelligent Agents, Optimal Coordination Mechanism