Coordinating Plans of Autonomous Agents

This book deals with an important topic in distributed AI: the coordination of autonomous agents' activities. It provides a framework for modelling agents with planning and communicative competence. Important issues in the book are: - How to recognize and reconcile conflicting intentions among a collection of agents. - How to recognize and take advantage of favorable interactions. - How to enable individual agents to represent and reason about the actions, plans, and knowledge of other agents in order to coordinate with them. - When to call a set of plans coordinated and what operations are possible to transform uncoordinated plans into coordinated ones. - How to enable agents to communicate and interact: what communication languages or protocols to use, and what and when to communicate. The book is clearly written with many examples and background material.

Inhalt
Cooperation and cordination of intelligent agents.- Actions and plans in multiagent domains.- Multiagent plan relations.- Handling plan relations.- Negotiation for plan coordination.- A synthesized model of distributed planning by autonomous cooperating agents.- Plan coordination for office automation and computer-supported cooperative work.- Conclusions.