" Planning and Execution in Multi-agent Environments"

8/7/1998: [time not recorded]
[location not recorded]

Abstract: Achieving one's goals in a social environment poses several challenges not generally addressed by traditional planning methods. Astute planners can make the most of social situations by recruiting the help of others and outmaneuvering potential adversaries. Planning for such encounters, rather than simply reacting to them, demands an ability to reason about the plans of others. But this requires more than adding multiple plans to a traditional planning system. One cannot directly manipulate other peoples plans, but can can only influence them indirectly and to varying degrees depending on our access to them, and their willingness to provide help. A truly multi-agent planning system must modulate it's planning and threat resolution approaches based on properties of the multiple plans it represents: do I have the authority to tell this person what to do; will this person attempt to defeat my goals; how do I avoid the threats they are presenting, etc. In this talk I present an extension to classical planning methods that facilitates their use in dynamic multi-agent domains. First, I discuss a technique for planing in a changing world that supports interleaving of plan generation, execution, and repair. Second, I extend this approach to support collaborative and adversarial planning. The approach implements a form of metaplanning that enables a planner to reason about properties of multiple plans in a single plan network. With this approach, a planner can simultaneously generate an individual plan, repair a second, and , together with a group, execute a third. This provides some of the key functionality of sophisticated multi-agent reasoning techniques (such as the shared plans approach of Grosz and Kraus), but within the context of better understood classical planning methods. As such, it helps bridge the gap between planning and multi-agent research.

Last updated: Mon Jun 19 17:44:06 2006