Continual coordination through shared activities

Interacting agents that interleave planning and execution must reach consensus on their commitments to each other. In domains where agents have varying degrees of interaction and different constraints on communication and computation, agents will require different coordination protocols in order to efficiently reach consensus in real time. We briefly describe a largely unexplored class of realtime, distributed planning problems (inspired by interacting spacecraft missions), new challenges they pose, and a general approach to solving the problems. These problems involve self-interested agents that have infrequent communication but collaborate on joint activities. We describe a Shared Activity Coordination (SHAC) framework that provides a decentralized algorithm for negotiating the scheduling of shared activities over the lifetimes of multiple agents, a soft, real-time approach to reaching consensus during execution with limited communication, and a foundation for customizing protocol...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: ATAL
• Authors: Bradley J. Clement, Anthony C. Barrett
• Keywords: ATAL 2003, Communication, Design Keywords Coordination, Shared Activity Coordination