Fusion of Plans in a Framework with Constraints

The promise of multi-agent systems is that multiple agents can solve problems more efficiently than single agents can. In this paper we propose a method to implement cooperation between agents in the planning phase, in order to achieve more cost-effective solutions than without cooperation. Two results are presented: First of all, we introduce a flexible framework to describe cooperation in a planning process. This framework allows us to specify the basic tasks that have to be performed in order to satisfy a set of goals, and to specify constraints to model deadlines, capacity constraints, speed limits, conflicting situations, et cetera. Furthermore, we present a polynomial fusion algorithm to implement cooperation between multiple agents.