Incorporating Uncertainty in Agent Commitments

Commitments play a central role in multi-agent coordination. However, they are inherently uncertain and it is important to take these uncertainties into account during planning and scheduling. This paper addresses the problem of handling the uncertainty in commitments. We propose a new model of commitment that incorporates the uncertainty, the use of contingency analysis to reduce the uncertainty, and a negotiation framework for handling commitments with uncertainty.

[1]  Nicholas R. Jennings,et al.  Commitments and conventions: The foundation of coordination in multi-agent systems , 1993, The Knowledge Engineering Review.

[2]  Victor R. Lesser,et al.  Advantages of a Leveled Commitment Contracting Protocol , 1996, AAAI/IAAI, Vol. 1.

[3]  Shlomo Zilberstein,et al.  Monitoring the Progress of Anytime Problem-Solving , 1996, AAAI/IAAI, Vol. 2.

[4]  Martha E. Pollack,et al.  Contingency Selection in Plan Generation , 1997, ECP.

[5]  Sviatoslav Brainov.  The Role and the Impact of Preferences on Multiagent Interaction , 1999, ATAL.

[6]  Victor R. Lesser,et al.  Criteria-directed task scheduling , 1998, Int. J. Approx. Reason..

[7]  Victor R. Lesser,et al.  Relating Quantified Motivations for Organizationally Situated Agents , 1999, ATAL.

[8]  Tuomas Sandholm,et al.  An Implementation of the Contract Net Protocol Based on Marginal Cost Calculations , 1993, AAAI.

[9]  Frank Dignum,et al.  Deliberative Normative Agents: Principles and Architecture , 1999, ATAL.

[10]  Victor R. Lesser,et al.  Generalizing the Partial Global Planning Algorithm , 1992, Int. J. Cooperative Inf. Syst..

[11]  Victor R. Lesser,et al.  Quantitative Modeling of Complex Computational Task Environments , 1993, AAAI.

[12]  Victor R. Lesser,et al.  Investigating Interactions between Agent Conversations and Agent Control Components , 2000, Issues in Agent Communication.

[13]  Katia Sycara,et al.  Using Option Pricing to Value Commitment Flexibility in Multi-agent Systems, , 1997 .

[14]  Nicholas R. Jennings,et al.  Coordination techniques for distributed artificial intelligence , 1996 .

[15]  Edmund H. Durfee,et al.  Trends in Cooperative Distributed Problem Solving , 1989, IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng..

[16]  Guido Boella,et al.  Cooperation and Group Utility , 1999, ATAL.

[17]  Cristiano Castelfranchi,et al.  Commitments: From Individual Intentions to Groups and Organizations , 1995, ICMAS.

[18]  Hector J. Levesque,et al.  Intention is Choice with Commitment , 1990, Artif. Intell..

[19]  Nicholas R. Jennings,et al.  Variable Sociability in Agent-Based Decision Making , 1999, ATAL.

[20]  B. L. Buteau,et al.  Decentralized negotiation: An approach to the distributed planning problem , 1992 .

[21]  Nicholas R. Jennings,et al.  Negotiation decision functions for autonomous agents , 1998, Robotics Auton. Syst..