Incorporating Uncertainty in 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. 1 Introduction In a multi-agent system, each agent can only have a partial view of other agents' behavior. Therefore, in order to coordinate the agents' activities, the agents need to have a mechanism to bridge their activities based on the partial knowledge. Commitments has emerged, among many research groups [1--3, 8], as the bridge for multi-agent coordination and planning. By definition, a commitment specifies a pledge to do a certain course of action [9]. A number of commitment semantics have been proposed, for ex...