Executing Decision-theoretic Plans in Multi-agent Environments
Michael P. Williamson, Katia P. Sycara, Keith Decker · 1996
An agent that carries out plans in a realistic domain faces many difficulties. Particular difficulties arise, though, when an agent participating in a multi-agent environment is executing decisiontheoretic plans. This paper describes these specific difficulties, and discusses potential avenues to their solution. By a cooperative, multi-agent we mean a system in which agents interact to collectively solve problems. In such an environment, many of the actions that an agent can perform are in fact speech acts, which induce some other agent to act on the first agent’s behalf. In some cases, the use of speech acts can simplify an agent’s planning process by off-loading some of the planning effort. For example, if you want an airplane ticket it’s much easier to call a travel agent than personally to go through the process of calling individual airlines, finding out schedules, comparing prices, making reservations, etc. But speech acts can also be problematic, because they magnify the existing problems faced by a single agent reasoning about its own actions: