Multi-Agent Planning and Coordination Under Resource Constraints

The research described in this thesis stems from ROBOCARE1, a three year research project aimed at developing software and robotic technology for providing intelligent support for elderly people. This thesis deals with two problems which have emerged in the course of the project’s development: Multi-agent coordination with scarce resources. Multi-agent planning is concerned with automatically devising plans or strategies for the coordinated enactment of concurrently executing agents. A common realistic constraint in applications which require the coordination of multiple agents is the scarcity of resources for execution. In these cases, concurrency is affected by limited capacity resources, the presence of which modifies the structure of the planning/coordination problem. Specifically, the first part of this thesis tackles this problem in two contexts, namely when planning is carried out centrally (planning from first principles), and in the context of distributed multi-agent coordination. Domain modeling for scheduling applications. It is often the case that the products of research in AI problem solving are employed to develop applications for supporting human decision processes. Our experience in ROBOCARE as well as other domains has often called for the customization of prototypical software for real applications. Yet the gap between what is often a research prototype and a complete decision support system is seldom easy to bridge. The second part of the thesis focuses on this issue from the point of view of scheduling software deployment. Overall, this thesis presents three contributions within the two problems mentioned above. First, we address the issue of planning in concurrent domains in which the complexity of coordination is dominated by resource constraints. To this end, an integrated planning and scheduling architecture is presented and employed to explore the structural trademarks of multi-agent coordination problems in function of The author has been involved in ROBOCARE since the beginning of the project, and has followed and influenced its evolution throughout its entire duration — http://robocare.istc.cnr.it.