Multiagent Planning as Control Synthesis

This paper proposes a new multiagent planning approach to coordination synthesis that views distributed agents as discrete-event processes. The connection between discreteevent control synthesis and coordination planning is first established, thereby enabling the exploitation of the vast body of knowledge and associated software synthesis tools from ‘The Supervisory Control of Discrete-Event Systems’ for automatic coordination synthesis of distributed agents. Importantly, these coordinating agents designed collectively generate a behaviour guaranteed not to contradict any specified inter-agent constraint, is nonblocking and optimal. A simple planning methodology is proposed in terms of procedures supported by CTCT, an existing, freely available design tool developed based on the control synthesis framework. A simple example illustrates the use of the CTCT-based methodology to synthesize coordination modules for distributed agents. Discussions in relation to previous work examine...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: ATAL
• Authors: Kiam Tian Seow, Chuan Ma, Makoto Yokoo
• Keywords: ATAL 2004, Automatic Coordination Synthesis, Control Synthesis, Coordination Synthesis