Conference article

Partially ordered plan structures are highly suitable for centralized multi-agent planning; where plans should be minimally constrained in terms of precedence between actions performed by different agents. In many cases; however; any given agent will perform its own actions in strict sequence. We take advantage of this fact to develop a hybrid of temporal partial order planning and forward-chaining planning. A sequence of actions is constructed for each agent and linked to other agents’ actions by a partially ordered precedence relation as required. When agents are not too tightly coupled; this structure enables the generation of partial but strong information about the state at the end of each agent’s action sequence. Such state information can be effectively exploited during search. A prototype planner within this framework has been implemented; using precondition control formulas to guide the search process.

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