CPlanT: Coalition Planning Multi-Agent System for Humanitarian Relief Operations

Planning humanitarian relief operations within a community of a high number of hardly collaborating and vaguely linked non-governmental organizations is a challenging problem. In this article we present an agent-oriented approach to modeling and supporting distributed decision making of agents - the humanitarian relief providers. Owing to the very special nature of this specific domain, where the agents may eventually agree to collaborate but are very often reluctant to share their knowledge and resources, we have combined classical negotiation mechanisms with the acquaintance models and social knowledge techniques.