Coordinating Agents - An Analysis of Coordination in Supply-chain Management Tasks

A multi-agent planning problem consists of a set of activities that need to be planned by several agents. Here, plan coordination methods play an important role, since the independently generated plans by different agents can lead to an infeasible joint solution. We study one particular plan coordination approach, called coordination-by-design, which allows each agent to make its own plan completely independent of the others, while guaranteeing the feasibility of the combined plan of all the agents as a joint solution to the multi-agent planning problem. In this paper, we are interested in a class of multi-agent planning problems that arise in supply-chain management applications. Although the coordination problem in general is Σ 2 -complete, it turns out for this special class, the complexity of coordination checking is polynomial and deciding a minimum coordination set is NP-complete. We develop a polynomial-time approximation algorithm to compute a sufficient