Coordinating Self-Interested Planning Agents

Abstract We consider planning problems where a number of non-cooperative agents have to work on a joint problem. Such problems consist in completing a set of interdependent, hierarchically ordered tasks. Each agent is assigned a subset of tasks to perform for which it has to construct a plan. Since the agents are non-cooperative, they insist on planning independently and do not want to revise their individual plans when the joint plan has to be assembled from the individual plans. We present a general formal framework to study some computational aspects of this non-cooperative coordination problem and we establish some complexity results to identify some of the factors that contribute to the complexity of this problem. Finally, we illustrate our approach with an application to coordination in multi-modal logistic planning. Keywords Planning agents - Autonomy - Coordination - Computional complexity