An investigation into team-based planning

Models of plan formation by teams of autonomous, social agents are of interest in the application of multi-agent systems in both engineering and commerce. A team of agents may be motivated by the need to achieve a common goal, and must agree on a plan of action. However, being autonomous entities, they may differ in the contributions that they are capable of making and may have varying attitudes towards the options available (e.g. preferences over who should do what). Furthermore, in general, it is not appropriate for a team plan to be imposed by a single manager agent. In this paper we investigate methods of collaborative plan construction and conflict resolution in teams of autonomous, social agents. We propose a multi-agent planning algorithm that interleaves planning with information exchange, coordination and negotiation, allowing the agents to handle potential conflicts, and to promote their own preferences over the derived solutions.