Description
Multiagent planning is concerned with planning by (and for) multiple
agents. It can involve agents planning for a common goal, an agent
coordinating the plans (plan merging) or planning of others, or agents
refining their own plans while negotiating over tasks or resources.
The topic also involves how agents can do this in real time while
executing plans (distributed continual planning). Multiagent
scheduling differs from multiagent planning the same way planning and
scheduling differ: in scheduling often the tasks that need to be
performed are already decided, and in practice, scheduling tends to
focus on algorithms for specific problem domains. Because of the
overlap in the fields, we will not distinguish them and will use
"planning" to refer to both planning and scheduling.
More than ever industry, space, and the military are seeking systems that can solve multiagent planning problems, such as those in supply chain management, coordinating space missions, and commanding mixtures of vehicles and troops. For many real-world problems it is hard to motivate multiple agents because centralized decision-making is often most efficient. One goal of this workshop is to identify methods for discerning how and when systems should be decentralized.
Multiagent planning and scheduling seems to fall in the intersection of the fields of planning and scheduling, distributed systems, parallel computing/algorithms, and multiagent systems. However, much of the research appears to build on ideas from either planning or multiagent systems (and usually not both). From the viewpoint of planning, planning for multiple agents means supporting concurrent action, and planning by multiple agents means parallelizing a planning algorithm. One might argue that the former has been done and the latter should be solved using parallel computing techniques and is dependent on hardware. On the other hand, from a multiagent systems perspective, multiagent planning is not about just solving planning problems but also how agents should behave and interact given that they have plans or planning capabilities.
From any point of view, there are many open issues in multiagent planning. While many planners can handle some notion of concurrency, and many plan merging algorithms have been proposed, there has been little work on decentralized planning, competitive planning systems, evaluation of communication costs, and distributed continual planning. We aim for this workshop to foster ideas addressing these issues and suggest other important research questions.
We solicit papers and position statements on topics including (but not limited to)
Program Committee