Divide and Conquer in Multi-Agent Planning

Distributed AI

Volume

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 12

Collaboration

In this paper, we suggest an approach to multiagent planning that contains heuristic elements. Our method makes use of subgoals, and derived sub-plans, to construct a global plan. Agents solve their individual sub-plans, which are then merged into a global plan. The suggested approach may reduce overall planning time and derives a plan that approximates the optimal global plan that would have been derived by a central planner, given those original subgoals. We consider two different scenarios. The first involves a group of agents with a common goal. The second considers how agents can interleave planning and execution when planning towards a common, though dynamic, goal.