Plan coordination by revision in collective agent based systems

In order to model plan coordination behavior of agents we develop a simple framework for representing plans, resources and goals of agents. Plans are represented as directed acyclic graphs of skills and resources that, given adequate initial resources, can realize special resources, called goals. Given the storage costs of resources, application costs of skills, and Values of goals, it is possible to reason about the profits of a plan for an agent. We then model two forms of plan coordination behavior between two agents, viz. fusion, aiming at the maximization of the total yield of the agents involved, and collaboration, which aims at the maximization of the individual yield of each agent. We argue how both forms of cooperation can be seen as iterative plan revision processes. We also present efficient polynomial algorithms for agent plan fusion and collaboration that are based on this idea of iterative plan revision. Both the framework and the fusion,algorithm will be illustrated by an example from the field of transportation, where agents are transportation companies. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.