A Simple Account of Multi-Agent Epistemic Planning

A realistic model of multi-agent planning must allow us to formalize notions which are absent in classical planning, such as communication and knowledge. We investigate multi-agent planning based on a simple logic of knowledge that is grounded on the visibility of propositional variables. Using such a formal logic allows us to prove the existence of a plan given the description of the individual actions. We present an encoding of multi-agent planning problems expressed in this logic into the classical planning language PDDL. The solvability of a planning task is reduced to a model checking problem in a dynamic extension of our logic, proving its complexity. Feeding the resulting problem into a PDDL planner provides a provably correct plan for the original multi-agent planning problem. We apply our method on several examples such as the gossip problem.