LANSKY@SRI-WARBUCKS.ARPA (Amy Lansky) (05/29/86)
SYNCHRONIZING PLANS AMONG INTELLIGENT AGENTS
VIA COMMUNICATION
Charlie Koo (KOO@SUSHI)
Stanford University
11:00 AM, MONDAY, June 2
SRI International, Building E, Room EJ228 (new conference room)
In a society where a group of agents cooperate to achieve certain
goals, the group members perform their tasks based on certain plans.
Some tasks may interact with tasks done by other agents. One way to
coordinate the tasks is to let a master planner generate a plan and
distribute tasks to individual agents accordingly. However, there are
two difficulties. Firstly, the master planner needs to know all the
expertise that each agent has. The amount of knowledge sharply
increases with the number of specialties. Secondly, the
master-planning process will be computationally more expensive than if
each agent plans for itself, since the planning space for the former
is much larger. Therefore, distributed planning is motivated.
The objective of this on-going research is to formalize a model for
synchronizing and monitoring plans independently made by nonhostile
intelligent agents via communication. The proposed model also will
provide means to monitor the progress of plan execution, to prevent
delays, and to modify plans with less effort when delays happen.
In this talk, a commitment-based communication model which allows
agents to track their commitments during execution of plans will be
proposed. It includes a language, a set of communication operators
and a set of commitment tracking operators. The process of
synchronizing plans based on this communication model will also be
described.
Relevant work: Contract Net, nonlinear planners, distributed planners.
VISITORS: Please arrive 5 minutes early so that you can be escorted up
from the E-building receptionist's desk. Thanks!