Abstract: The issue of multi-agent planning in highly dynamic environments is a major impediment to conventional planning solutions. Plan repair and replanning solutions alike have difficulty adapting to frequently changing environment states. To adequately handle such situations, this paper instead focuses on preserving individual agent plans through multi-agent coordination techniques. We describe a reactive agent system architecture in which the main focus of an agent is to be able to achieve its subgoals without interfering with any other agent. The system is a 3-level architecture, where each level is guided by the following fundamental principles, respectively: whenis it valid to generate a plan for a subgoal, whois most appropriate for completing the subgoal, and howshould the plan be carried out.

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to introduce a multi- agent model for plan synthesis in which the production of a global shared plan is based on a unified framework based on HTN and POP approaches. In order to take into account agents' partial knowledge and heterogeneous skills, we propose to consider the global multi-agent planning process as a POP planning procedure where agents exchange proposals and counter-proposal. Each agent's proposal is produced by a relaxed HTN approach that defines partial plans in accordance with the plan space search planning, i.e., plan steps can contain open goals and threats. Agents' interactions define a joint investigation that enable them to progressively prune threats, solve open goals and elaborate solutions step by step. This distributed search is sound and complete.

Abstract: The research described in this thesis stems from ROBOCARE1, a three year research project aimed at developing software and robotic technology for providing intelligent support for elderly people. T ...

Abstract: Many existing planning approaches assume the existence of a centralized planner that has complete information of its planning problem. However, with the increasing popularity of distributed paradigm today, a planning problem may span across the boundaries of different organizations. Consequently, such a problem is difficult to be managed by any single organization. In this paper, we propose a new graph based approach for distributed planning without a centralized planner. Our approach employs distributed constraint satisfaction (DisCSP) and graph planning techniques. It encompasses both of functional and non-functional plannings.

Abstract: This article presents an extension to classical planning techniques that facilitates their use in dynamic multi-agent domains. The approach augments an integrated model of plan generation, execution and repair with two additional capabilities. The first is a general approach to multi-agent reasoning that allows an agent to reason about the plans of other agents and alter its planning behavior based on its relationship to those agents. Second, it incorporates an approach to plan management that implements higher-level planning constructs such as intentions to structure multi-

Abstract: The paper is based on FieldExchange --- a computer system responsible for monitoring and supporting resource re-distribution decision making in BT's Operational Resource Management units This paper considers the problem of resource allocation in the service industries approached from an agent-based perspective The problem is formulated as a centralized/distributed planning problem The paper describes the context of this solution, the general model and solution and four specific implementations with results and discussion

Abstract: This paper addresses the problem of identifying the value of information held by a teammate on a distributed, multi-agent team. It focuses on a distributed scheduling task in which computer agents support people who are carrying out complex tasks in a dynamic environment. The paper presents a decision-theoretic algorithm for determining the value of information that is potentially relevant to schedule revisions, but is directly available only to the person and not the computer agent. The design of a "coordination autonomy" (CA) module within a coordination-manager system provided the empirical setting for this work. By design, the CA module depends on an external scheduler module to determine the specific effect of additional information on overall system performance. The paper describes two methods for reducing the number of queries the CA issues to the scheduler, enabling it to satisfy computational resource constraints placed on it. Experimental results indicate the algorithm improves system performance and establish the exceptional efficiency---measured in terms of the number of queries required for estimating the value of information---that can be achieved by the query-reducing methods.