Conflict detection during plan integration for multi-agent systems

Abstract

This paper describes techniques developed for conflict detection during plan integration. Agents' intensions are represented with intended goal structure (IGS) and the E-PERT diagrams. Conflicts are classified as goal, plan, and belief conflicts. Before integrating individual plans and detecting plan conflicts, agents first detect and eliminate their goal conflicts by exchanging their IGS. Plan integration is done through merging individual E-PERT diagrams. Project estimation and review technique (PERT) diagrams have been used extensively in the systems analysis area since the 1980s to provide a global consistent view of parallel activities within a project. We extended the PERT diagrams for use in the plan integration activity within multi-agent systems (MAS). The E-PERT diagram contributes to maintain traceable temporal relations among agents' local scheduled actions. Combined with pattern matching, plan conflicts due to resource sharing, or conflicting conditions (i.e., postconditions of one action disabling preconditions of another action) can be detected. The conflict detection techniques are implemented in a sensible agent testbed to promote deployment and performance analysis.

Tasks for agent-based negotiation teams: Analysis, review, and challenges

“…In multi-agent literature, one can identify works where conflict detection mechanisms are designed for specific domains like cooperative planning or air traffic management [37,38,39,40]. In [37,40], virtual cylinders delimit the protected and alert zone of each aircraft.…”

Conflict resolution in multi-agent systems based on negotiation and arbitrage

“…Conflicts occurring among agents are intrinsic and direct when the goals or beliefs that agents hold are logically inconsistent [2]. The conflicts should be resolved in order to ensure the agents cooperate to produce a global solution.…”

“…The generic conflict resolution process includes conflict detection, search for solutions, and communication among agents to reach an agreement [2].…”

A Modeling Methodology for Conflict Control in Multi-Agent Systems

“…Through analyzing local plans, the integration algorithm may request some local plans be updated in order to generate conflict-free global plans -a global plan being conflict-free means that no run-time conflict is possible to occur in the MAS described and developed based on this global plan. A number of publication results describe research works using this approach [BL99,BL01,MT96,RH03,RHM03]. For example, [RH03,RHM03] followed this approach to design a conflict resolution algorithm for air traffic management.…”