Handling Uncertainty in Multi-Agent Commitments
Ping Xuan, Victor Lesser · 1999
Commitments play a central role in multi-agent coordination. However, they are inherently uncertain and it is important to take these uncertainties into account during planning and scheduling. This paper addresses the problem of handling the uncertainty in commitments. We propose a new model of commitment that incorporates the uncertainty, the use of contingency analysis to reduce the uncertainty, and a negotiation framework for handling commitments with uncertainty. Keywords: Multi-agent coordination, Multi-agent planning, Decision making under uncertainty 1 Introduction Handling uncertainty is one of the major topics in artificial intelligence. In a multi-agent system, an agent needs to handle not only the uncertain aspects of its own activities, but also the uncertain perceptions about other agents' behaviors. In this paper we study the uncertainty associated with the commitments among the agents and techniques to reduce the uncertainty. In a multi-agent system, each agent can onl...