The role of representation in interaction (abstract): discovering focal points among alternative solutions

In multiagent planning an agent sometimes needs to collaborate with others to construct complex plans, or to accomplish large organizational tasks which he cannot do alone. Since each agent in a group may have incorrect beliefs about the world, and because agent's abilities differ, construction of a coordinated plan can be confounded. In this paper we propose a scheme for constructing plans for collaborating agents from their, possibly incorrect, beliefs and partial knowledge of the world. In the proposed scheme, when agents want to accomplish a goal together, each agent first proposes a possibly incomplete individual plan based on his own beliefs and skills. Then the agents use their individual plans to mutually construct a collaborative plan to accomplish the goal. A collaborative activity can be a composite action involving parts to be done by one agent, parts to be done concurrently by agents, and parts to be done jointly. The proposed method makes it possible for each agent to decide, without excessive communication, what actions he should take in collaboration.