Distributed management of flexible times schedules

In this paper we consider the problem of managing and exploiting schedules in an uncertain and distributed environment. We assume a team of collaborative agents, each responsible for executing a portion of a globally pre-established schedule, but none possessing a global view of either the problem or solution. Each individual agent is aware of dependencies between its scheduled actions and those of other agents (providing a basis for online coordination), and each agent is also provided with a set of local contingency (fallback) options. The goal is to maximize the joint quality obtained from the actions executed by all agents, given that unexpected events will force changes to some prescribed actions and reduce the utility of executing others as execution unfolds. We describe an agent architecture for solving this problem that couples two basic mechanisms: (1) a “flexible times” representation of the agent’s schedule (using a Simple Temporal Network (STN)), which hedges agains...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: ATAL
• Authors: Stephen F. Smith, Anthony Gallagher, Terry L. Zimmerman
• Keywords: Agent Architectures, Agent’s Schedule, ATAL 2007, Feasible Solution