Agents operating in a multi-agent environment must consider not just their own actions, but also those of the other agents in the system. Artificial social systems are a well known means for coordinating a set of agents, without requiring centralized planning or online negotiation between agents. Artificial social systems enact a social law which restricts the agents from performing some actions under some circumstances. A good social law prevents the agents from interfering with each other, but does not prevent them from achieving their goals. However, designing good social laws, or even checking whether a proposed social law is good, are hard questions. In this paper, we take a first step towards automating these processes, by formulating criteria for good social laws in a multi-agent planning framework. We then describe an automated technique for verifying if a proposed social law meets these criteria, based on a compilation to classical planning.

The introduction of the concept of state novelty has advanced the state of the art in deterministic online planning in Atari-like problems and in planning with rewards in general, when rewards are defined on states. In classical planning, however, the success of novelty as the dichotomy between novel and non-novel states was somewhat limited. Until very recently, novelty-based methods were not able to successfully compete with state-of-the-art heuristic search based planners. In this work we adapt the concept of novelty to heuristic search planning, defining the novelty of a state with respect to its heuristic estimate. We extend the dichotomy between novel and non-novel states and quantify the novelty degree of state facts. We then show a variety of heuristics based on the concept of novelty and exploit the recently introduced best-first width search for satisficing classical planning. Finally, we empirically show the resulting planners to significantly improve the state of the art in satisficing planning.