TOLERANT PLANNING AND NEGOTIATION IN MULTIAGENT ENVIRONMENTS

摘要

Tolerant planning improves the likelihood of plans being successfully executed despite uncertainties and changes during execution. By tolerating execution errors, dynamic replanning need not be invoked as often or as immediately as in a less tolerant plan. The approach in designing tolerant plans is to allow for redundancies in the requirements (usually resources) for execution. While this approach is feasible, it raises another problem—more conflicts must be resolved during planning. This conflict resolution problem can be solved using a novel model of iterative negotiation for multiagent coordination. It requires agents to be skillful in negotiating with other agents to resolve conflicts in such a way as to minimize compromising their own tolerance while being benevolent in helping others find a feasible plan. This paper also describes an application of these concepts in a planner that generates conflict-free movement schedules for several mobile robots in a factory domain.