An Investigation of Multi-Agent Planning in CLP

Abstract

This paper explores the use of Constraint Logic Programming (CLP) as a platform for experimenting with planning problems in the presence of multiple interacting agents. The paper develops a novel constraintbased action language, B MAP , that enables the declarative description of large classes of multi-agent and multi-valued domains. B MAP supports several complex features, including combined effects of concurrent and interacting actions, concurrency control, and delayed effects. The paper presents a mapping of B MAP theories to CLP and it demonstrates the effectiveness of an implementation in SICStus Prolog on several benchmark problems. The effort is an evolution of previous research on using CLP for single-agent domains, demonstrating the flexibility of CLP technology to handle the more complex issues of multi-agency and concurrency. * An extended abstract of this work, entitled Representing Multi-Agent Planning in CLP, has appeared in [13].

Solving distributed constraint optimization problems using logic programming

“…Starting with some seminal papers (Kowalski and Sadri 1999), various authors have explored the use of several different flavors of logic programming, such as normal logic programs and abductive logic programs, to address cooperation between agents (Sadri and Toni 2003;Kakas et al 2004;De Vos et al 2005;Gelfond and Watson 2007). Some proposals have also explored the combination between constraint programming, logic programming, and formalization of multi-agent domains (Vlahavas 2002;Dovier et al 2010aDovier et al , 2010bDovier et al , 2013. Logic programming has been used in modeling multi-agent scenarios involving agents knowledge about other's knowledge (Baral et al 2010), computing models in the logics of knowledge (Pontelli et al 2010), multi-agent planning (Son et al 2009) and formalizing negotiation (Sakama et al 2011).…”