Enabling Agility through Coordinating Temporally Constrained Planning Agents

Enabling Agility through Coordinating Temporally Constrained Planning Agents

Steenhuisen, J.R.
De Weerdt, M.M.
Witteveen, C.

Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Software Computer Technology

2007-05-13

In crisis response, hierarchical organizations are being replaced by dynamic assemblies of autonomous agents that promise more agility. However, these autonomous agents might cause a decrease in effectiveness when individually constructed plans for moderately-coupled tasks are not jointly feasible. Existing coordination techniques can be applied in the pre-planning phase to guarantee feasible joint plans for partially-ordered tasks, which allows for human improvisation in the planning phase. Temporal relations in crisis response are often more complex than the simple precedence relations in current work. Therefore, we analyze whether temporal information can be dealt with by a conversion to partially-ordered tasks with only precedence constraints. Time windows and two temporal constraints (overlaps and during) can be rewritten in such a way that the task remains partially-ordered. When other temporal constraints (meets, starts, finishes, and equals) are used, tasks become tightly-coupled, requiring coordination in the execution phase as well. This work shows the applicability of pre-planning coordination as an enabling technology for the effective formation of agile organizations.

multi-agent system
planning
qualitative temporal constraints
coordination

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:8370d5f4-aea9-49cf-b8e8-99b27aeadca5

ISCRAM

978-90-5487-417-1

ISCRAM 2007: Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management, Delft, The Netherlands, 13-16 May 2007

Institutional Repository

conference paper

(c) 2007 The Author(s)
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