1 To appear in the International Journal of Intelligent Cooperative Information Systems, issue 2. This work was supported by DARPA contract N00014-92-J-1698, and partly by the Office of Naval Research under a University Research Initiative grant, number N00014-86-K-0764, and NSF contract CDA 8922572. The content of the information does not necessarily reflect the position or the policy of the Government and not official endorsement should be inferred. The distributed coordination problem can be described as how should the local scheduling of activities at each agent be affected by non-local concerns and constraints. Partial global planning (PGP) is a flexible approach to distributed coordination that allows agents to respond dynamically to their current situation. It is based on detecting relationships in the computational goal structures of the distributed agents. However, the detailed PGP mechanisms depend on the existence and availability of certain characteristics and structures that are idiosyncratic to the Distributed Vehicle Monitoring Testbed (DVMT). Generalized Partial Global Planning tries to extend the PGP approach by communicating more abstract and hierarchically organized information, detecting in a general way the coordination relationships that are needed by the partial global planning mechanisms, and separating the process of coordination from local scheduling. This new characterization of partial global planning has less communication overhead and can be more easily adapted and extended to new styles of problem solving and new multi-agent environments that have different characteristics than the original DVMT. This paper first describes the coordination problem as it was viewed by the PGP algorithm, and then extensions to that problem. It then briefly describes our model of task structures and coordination relationships. Finally, we show how the PGP algorithm, as an example, can be described using our method.
For example, Generalized Partial Global Planning (GPGP) REF uses Partial Global Plan (PGP) mechanism to ensure consistency between the plans of multiple agents.
Generalizing the Partial Global Planning Algorithm
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INTELLIGENT AND COOPERATIVE INFORMATION SYSTEMS
Computer Science