CMU RI proposal: Management of Distributed Schedules in Uncertain Environments using Simple Temporal Network Representations

Anthony Gallagher, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University

28 Jul 2006

Abstract: Cooperative agents working as a team to achieve a common goal need to coordinate their action so that a cohesive solution is obtained that achieves the team's objective. The practical constraints of many applications often times prevent any agent in the team from obtaining a global view of the team's problem, necessitating the development of distributed planning and scheduling techniques. While many researchers have focused on the distributed planning problem, multi-agent scheduling has received less attention. This research focuses on extending Simple Temporal Network (STN) based schedulers to operate in multi-agent domains with uncertain environments. We propose to develop pro-active techniques to increase the robustness of the agents's schedules to uncertain events, investigate reactive techniques to manage inconsistent information, and exploit the constraint conflict information provided by the STN to design a conflict-directed coordination approach.

Further Details: A copy of the thesis proposal document can be found at http://poma.ius.cs.cmu.edu/anthonyg/proposal.pdf.