Multi-agent Cooperation in a Planning Framework
Mathijs M. De Weerdt, A. Bos, J.F.M. Tonino, Cees Witteveen · 2000
The promise of multi-agent systems is that multiple agents can solve problems more eciently than single agents can. In this paper we propose a method to implement cooperation between agents in the planning phase, in order to achieve more cost-eective solutions than without cooperation. Two results are presented: First of all, we introduce a exible framework to describe cooperation in a planning process. This framework allows us to specify the basic tasks that have to be performed in order to satisfy a set of goals, and to specify constraints to model deadlines, capacity constraints, speed limits, conicting situations, et cetera. Furthermore, we present a polynomial fusion algorithm to implement cooperation between multiple agents. 1 Introduction Due to their autonomous character, agents plan D C B A E F taxi(2; F; 3) taxi(1; A; 3) p(2; C; 2) p(1; A; 1) p(3; D; 1) Figure 1: Overview of the locations and the initial situation. The dashed arrows represented the go...