Decoupling the multiagent disjunctive temporal problem

Abstract

In multiagent scheduling, each agent has to schedule its activities to respect its local (internal) temporal constraints, and also to satisfy external constraints between its activities and activities of other agents. A scheduling problem is decoupled if each agent can independently (and thus privately, autonomously, etc.) form a solution to its local problem such that agents' combined solutions are guaranteed to satisfy all external constraints. We expand previous work that decouples multiagent scheduling problems containing strictly conjunctive temporal constraints to more general problems containing disjunctive constraints. While this raises a host of challenging issues, agents can leverage shared information as early and as often as possible to quickly adopt additional temporal constraints within their local problems that sacrifice some local scheduling flexibility in favor of decoupled, independent, and rapid local scheduling.