Decommitting in multi-agent execution in non-deterministic environment: experimental approach

The process of planning in complex, multi-actor environment depends strongly on the ability of the individual actors to perform intelligent decommitment upon specific changes in the environment. Reasoning about decommitment alternatives during the planning process contributes to flexibility and robustness of the resulting plan. In this article we formally introduce and discuss three specific decommitment rules: (i) relaxation, (ii) delegation and (iii) full decommitment. We argue that appropriate selection, setting and preference ordering of the decommitment rules contributes to robustness (measured as a number of failures) of the overall plans. The presented claims are supported by empirical experiments.

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