An agent-oriented multiagent planning system

this paper describes a multiagent planning system, MuPAC, that formulates cooperative plans efficiently. It contains three features: meta-level planning, breakable and unbreakable action representations, and an integrated agent screening and assignment procedure. The meta-level planning transforms an original goal statement into a skeletal plan, which is easier to follow and helps reduce the chance of conflicts at low-level actions. The breakable/unbreakable action representation specifies specific agent-action requirements. It also specifies concurrency and cooperation possibilities among actions. It makes plan generation and agent assignment straight forward, thus reducing the reasoning time of finding parallelism and cooperation among agents. The integrated agent screening and assignment procedure formulates plans following the skeletal plan. The performance of MuPAC has been discussed along four aspects: planning efficiency, planning flexibility, agent cooperation, and plan quality. Results have shown that significant improvement has been achieved.