Planning Over Multi-Agent Epistemic States: A Classical Planning Approach

Abstract

Many AI applications involve the interaction of multiple autonomous agents, requiring those agents to reason about their own beliefs, as well as those of other agents. However, planning involving nested beliefs is known to be computationally challenging. In this work, we address the task of synthesizing plans that necessitate reasoning about the beliefs of other agents. We plan from the perspective of a single agent with the potential for goals and actions that involve nested beliefs, non-homogeneous agents, co-present observations, and the ability for one agent to reason as if it were another. We formally characterize our notion of planning with nested belief, and subsequently demonstrate how to automatically convert such problems into problems that appeal to classical planning technology. Our approach represents an important first step towards applying the well-established field of automated planning to the challenging task of planning involving nested beliefs of multiple agents.

Dynamic term-modal logics for first-order epistemic planning

“…The framework is however restricted to single-agent planning, does not support higher-order reasoning, and allows only a restricted form of quantification. The multi-agent planning frameworks in [46,61] follow a compilation approach, translating restricted fragments of epistemic planning into classical planning languages.…”

“…In [47], the authors extend this framework to cover on-line planning from the perspective of the agents themselves. The planner in Muise et al [61] requires a finite depth of nesting of modalities and no disjunctions. Cooper et al [23] use an encoding based on special variables describing what agents can see.…”

Expected Value of Communication for Planning in Ad Hoc Teamwork

“…can change the state of the world, which we refer to as ontic actions, as defined in Muise et al (2015), and a set of potential queries Q it can ask. Similarly, A T = O T ∪ R is a set of ontic actions that the teammate can execute O T and the set of possible responses R to the ego agent's query.…”

A Simple Framework for Cognitive Planning

“…There, reasoning is strictly more complex than in classical logic: the satisfiability problem is at least in PSPACE (Halpern and Moses 1992). Based on earlier work by Levesque, Muise et al studied epistemic planning in fragments of standard epistemic logic (Muise et al 2015). They considered state descriptions in terms of conjunctions of epistemic literals: formulas that do not contain any conjunction or disjunction.…”