Coordination in Multi-Agent Planning with an Application in Logistics

Abstract

Multi-agent planning comprises planning in an environment with multiple autonomous actors. Techniques for multi-agent planning differ from conventional planning in that planning activities are distributed and the planning autonomy of the agents must be respected. We focus on approaches to coordinate the multi-agent planning process. While usually coordination is intertwined with the planning process, we distinguish a number of separate phases in the planning process to get a clear view on the different role(s) of coordination. In particular, we discuss the pre-planning coordination phase and post-planning coordination phase. In the pre-planning part, we view coordination as the process of managing (sub) task dependencies and we discuss a method that ensures complete planning autonomy by introducing additional (intra-agent) dependencies. In the post-planning part, we will show how agents can improve their plans through the exchange of resources. We present a plan merging algorithm that uses these resources to reduce the costs of independently developed plans. This (any-time) algorithm runs in polynomial time.