Extensibility based multiagent planner with plan diversity metrics

Abstract

Coordinated sequential decision making of a team of cooperative agents is described by principles of multiagent planning. In this work, we extend the MA-Strips formalism with the notion of extensibility and reuse a well-known initiator–participants scheme for agent negotiation. A multiagent extension of the Generate-And-Test principle is used to distributively search for a coordinated multiagent plan. The generate part uses a novel plan quality estimation technique based on metrics often used in the field of diverse planning. The test part builds upon planning with landmark actions by compilation to classic planning. Finally, our approach was experimentally evaluated on four classic IPC benchmark domains modified for multiagent settings. The results show (1) which combination of plan quality estimation and (2) which diversity metrics provide the best planning efficiency.