Coordinating Non Cooperative Planning Agents: Complexity Results

Whenever independent, non-cooperative actors jointly have to solve a complex task, they need to coordinate their efforts. Typical examples of such task coordination problems are supply chain management, multi-modal transportation and patient-centered health care management. Common elements in such problems are a complex task, i.e., a set of interdependent subtasks, and a set of competitive actors. Solving a task coordination problem first of all requires to solve a task allocation problem (how to assign competitive actors to the subtasks). As a result, each of the actors will receive a set of subtasks to complete and will need to make a plan for this set of tasks. Therefore, also a plan coordination problem has to be solved (how to ensure that a joint plan always can be composed, whatever plan is chosen by the individual actors). The aim of this paper is twofold: first of all to present a general formal framework to study some computational aspects of this non-cooperative coordinati...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: IAT
• Authors: Adriaan ter Mors, Cees Witteveen
• Keywords: Complex Task, Coordination Problem, IAT 2005, Intelligent Agent, Task Coordination Problem