CONSENSUS AND COMPROMISE: PLANNING IN COOPERATING AGENTS
R. CLARK, Cliff Grossner, T. Radhakrishnan · International Journal of Cooperative Information Systems · 1996
Resolving disparate viewpoints via planning is an important aspect of the distributed problem solving performed by the agents in Cooperative Intelligent Information Systems. We propose a distributed planning protocol called Consensus. Consensus specifies a methodology by which agents exchange information indicating their preferred actions, integrate these different sets of actions, resolve any conflicts that exist, and choose a joint set of actions. Within the framework of the Consensus protocol, two different heuristics are proposed for resolving conflicts which overcome the computational complexity of an exhaustive search. An implementation of the Consensus protocol is analyzed experimentally to assess its performance in resolving conflicts. The experimental results indicate the trade-off between the cost of planning and the quality of the plan produced with respect to the heuristics used for resolving conflicts.