Decentralized Multi-agent Plan Repair in Dynamic Environments

Achieving joint objectives by teams of cooperative planning agents requires significant coordination and communication efforts. For a singleagent system facing a plan failure in a dynamic environment, arguably, attempts to repair the failed plan in general do not straightforwardly bring any benefit in terms of time complexity. However, in multi-agent settings the communication complexity might be of a much higher importance, possibly a high communication overhead might be even prohibitive in certain domains. We hypothesize that in decentralized systems, where coordination is enforced to achieve joint objectives, attempts to repair failed multi-agent plans should lead to lower communication overhead than replanning from scratch. The contribution of the presented paper is threefold. Firstly, we formally introduce the multi-agent plan repair problem and formally present the core hypothesis underlying our work. Secondly, we propose three algorithms for multi-agent plan repair reducing the problem to specialized instances of the multi-agent planning problem. Classical planning and multi-agent planning based on classical planning are approaches to constructing autonomous agents and teams of agents, which attempt to achieve their objectives in an environment. The result of the planning process is traditionally a plan, a sequence of actions the agent should perform in order to achieve a given goal. This is the full version of an extended abstract published in Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2012), Conitzer, Winikoff, Padgham, and van der Hoek (eds.),