CONSENSUS AND COMPROMISE - PLANNING IN COOPERATING AGENTS

Resolving disparate viewpoints via planning is an important aspect of the distributed problem solving performed by the agents in Cooperative Intelligent Information Systems. We propose a distributed planning pr otocol called Consensus. Consensus specifies a methodology by which ag ents exchange information indicating their preferred actions, integrat e these different sets of actions, resolve any conflicts that exist, a nd choose a joint set of actions. Within the framework of the Consensu s protocol, two different heuristics are proposed for resolving confli cts which overcome the computational complexity of an exhaustive searc h. An implementation of the Consensus protocol is analyzed experimenta lly to assess its performance in resolving conflicts. The experimental results indicate the trade-off between the cost of planning and the q uality of the plan produced with respect to the heuristics used for re solving conflicts.