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Abstract

In a multi-agent system, agents are carrying out certain tasks by executing plans. Consequently, the problem of finding a plan, given a certain goal, has been given a lot of attention in the literature. Instead of concentrating on this problem, the focus of this paper is on cooperation between agents which already have constructed plans for their goals. By cooperating, agents might reduce the number of actions they have to perform in order to fulfill their goals. The key idea is that in carrying out a plan an agent possibly produces side products that can be used as resources by other agents. As a result, an other agent can discard some of its planned actions. This process of exchanging products, called plan merging, results in distributed plans in which agents become dependent on each other, but are able to attain their goals more efficiently. In order to model this kind of cooperation, a new formalism is developed in which side products are modeled explicitly. The formalism is a resource logic based on the notions of resource, skill, goal, and service. Starting with some resources, an agent can perform a number of skills in order to produce other resources which suffice to achieve some given goals. Here, a skill is an elementary production process taking as inputs resources satisfying certain constraints. A service is a serial or parallel composition of skills acting as a program. An operational semantics is developed for these services as programs. Using this formalism, an algorithm for plan merging is developed, which is anytime and runs in polynomial time. Furthermore, a variant of this algorithm is proposed that handles the exchange of resources in a more flexible way. The ideas in the paper will be illustrated by an example from public transportation.

Comprehensive Multi-Agent Epistemic Planning

“…As said before, epistemic planning is not only interested in the state of the world but also in the beliefs and the knowledge of the agents. Although there is a large body of research on multi-agent planning [7,8,18], very few efforts address the above mentioned aspects of multi-agent domains, which pose a number of new research challenges in representing and reasoning about actions and change.…”

“…To maximize the potentials of such autonomous systems, multi-agent planning and scheduling research [7][8][9]23,25] will need to keep pace. As already said, creating a plan for multiple agents to achieve a goal will need to take into consideration agents' knowledge, beliefs and to account for aspects like trust, dishonesty, deception and incomplete knowledge.…”

Design of a Solver for Multi-Agent Epistemic Planning

“…As said before, epistemic planning is not only interested in the state of the world but also in the beliefs and the knowledge of the agents. Although there is a large body of research on multi-agent planning [1,8,9,17,18], very few efforts address the above mentioned aspects of multi-agent domains, which pose a number of new research challenges in representing and reasoning about actions and change.…”