Primary and secondary diagnosis of multi-agent plan execution

Abstract

Diagnosis of plan failures is an important subject in both single-and multi-agent planning. Plan diagnosis can be used to deal with plan failures in three ways: (i) to provide information necessary for the adjustment of the current plan or for the development of a new plan, (ii) to point out which equipment and/or agents should be repaired or adjusted to avoid further violation of the plan execution, and (iii) to identify the agents responsible for planexecution failures. We introduce two general types of plan diagnosis: primary plan diagnosis identifying the incorrect or failed execution of actions, and secondary plan diagnosis that identifies the underlying causes of the faulty actions. Furthermore, three special cases of secondary plan diagnosis are distinguished, namely agent diagnosis, equipment diagnosis and environment diagnosis.

Diagnosis of coordination failures: a matrix-based approach

“…Other diagnoses of multi-agent systems algorithms (presented in detail in Section 9) do not focus on coordination among agents and so they do not address coordination failures but rather failures that occur in plans of multi-agent systems [22,7,18,19,17]. Other works [14,3,5] present a failure-based approach, where the failures and their associated diagnoses are modeled in advance.…”

“…The algorithm goes over the coordination-matrices in C and for each one it computes the diagnosis inferred by the comparison of Ω and C i (lines [4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15]. If the diagnosis is empty, then the whole diagnosis ∆ is empty, since one coordination matrix must be satisfied in order to satisfy the coordination rule due to the nature of the 'or' operator (lines [16][17][18].…”

“…In recent works, Roos and Witteveen [22] and de Jonge et al [7] investigated the diagnosis problem in multi-agent systems plan. In particular, they developed a distributed architecture to model and maintenance MAS plans and to identify faulty agents that violate the execution of the plan.…”

Cooperative Monitoring to Diagnose Multiagent Plans

“…In the work by de Jonge et al (2009), the basic framework is extended: agents are seen as resources, and action models also includes variables about agents' equipment and environment events (i.e., exogenous events). This extension allows the distinction between primary and secondary diagnoses.…”

“…In particular, in their diagnostic framework, de Jonge et al (2009) consider action failures (i.e., actions that do not reach their expected effects), and introduce the notion of plan diagnosis. A plan diagnosis is a subset of (already performed) actions that, when assumed abnormal, make the plan execution consistent with the observations received so far.…”