This work will be primarily concerned with scheduling behaviors. Coordination behaviors in turn rest on more basic agent behaviors such as following rules, creating organizations, communicating information, and negotiation or other conflict resolution mechanisms. The agents can be humans, computer programs, or some mixture of the two. For each shared goal, multiple plans to achieve that goal are possible-these plans involve multiple agents but are not always laid out explicitly. Agents plan to meet multiple goals, and schedule actions from multiple plans.
Schedulable actions can include the derivation of new goals or plans locally or at other agents.
We will however consider the existence of multiple, potentially incompatible goals, and multiple, potentially incompatible plans. We use the term domain to refer to a general class of more specific environments -we may refer to the distributed sensor network domain, or the manufacturing scheduling domain. An episode in the processor manufacturing environment might describe certain equipment that was available, certain production goals and raw materials, and certain equipment and quality control failures that occurred in the episode. This is a difficult proposition in many cases. The agents may have an incomplete view of the problem, and thus not realize which activities are redundant or that certain information would be helpful.