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An efficient lightweight coordination model to multi-agent planning

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Abstract

The main issue in multi-agent planning (MAP) is the agents’ coordination process that is a computationally hard problem. Thus, many works focus on the planning strategy considering the computational process, agents’ distribution roles, information privacy, and the resources coupling level. But domain-independent models that explore the balance between coordination process and privacy leading to efficient execution are missing. In this manuscript, we present a Lightweight Coordination Multi-agent Planning (LCMAP), a domain-independent model that balances the coordination process and privacy through three independent phases: (i) verification—each agent verifies its capabilities of reaching the goals; (ii) transformation—the coordinator selects agents through their capabilities and distributes the goals, transforming the original problem into single-agent problems; and (iii) validation—each plan is validated to check whether it can be parallel. LCMAP was compared to the state-of-the-art models to evaluate time efficiency and plan length during the problem-solving process using loosely and tightly coupled domains with specific evaluation metrics inherited from planning competitions. Furthermore, we conducted experiments to evaluate the execution efficiency regarding different configurations concerning planning time and plan length of the models, when LCMAP execution proves to be efficient.

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Notes

  1. https://gitlab.com/InfoKnow/AutomatedPlanning/LeonardoMoreira-LCMAP.

  2. Pre-planning tries to guarantee that the agents’ plans can be combined into a solution that satisfies the goals of the MAP task [44].

  3. http://www.icaps-conference.org/.

  4. https://gitlab.com/InfoKnow/AutomatedPlanning/LeonardoMoreira-LCMAP.

  5. http://www.plg.inf.uc3m.es/sw-ipc2011/IPCReport.

  6. IPC is a biennial event organized in the International Conference on Planning and Scheduling with objectives such as to provide a forum for an empirical comparison of planning systems. (http://www.plg.inf.uc3m.es/ipc2011-deterministic/).

  7. https://linux.die.net/man/1/time.

  8. http://agents.fel.cvut.cz/codmap/results/presentation-RESULTS.pdf.

  9. \(\overline{metric}\) describe the arithmetic mean of the values of the model considering all the experiments.

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Acknowledgements

Prof. Célia G. Ralha thanks the support received from the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) for the research productivity Grant Number 311301/2018-5.

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  1. Department of Computer Science, Institute of Exact Sciences, University of Brasília, Brasília, Brazil

    Leonardo Henrique Moreira & Célia Ghedini Ralha

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  1. Leonardo Henrique Moreira
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Moreira, L.H., Ralha, C.G. An efficient lightweight coordination model to multi-agent planning. Knowl Inf Syst 64, 415–439 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10115-021-01638-5

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