Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
536 Advanced Artificial Intelligence
means that global goal of multi-agent system is decomposed and is assigned to
one or a group of agents in the system so as to accomplish the target. Here we
emphasize the later problem, or say, in the beginning of planning every agent has
its own goal, which may be assigned to the agent or be formed to meet its own
interest. Furthermore, for multi-agent system and agents in the system we assume:
(1) Any effect of all actions is a deterministic function of system status when the
job and action is being preformed.
(2) Agent posses all the knowledge of its own action, actions of other agents and
the initial states of the system.
(3) The change of system can only be caused by actions of agents.
(4) No matter whether a agent could make planning successfully, it will keep the
promise of actions with other agents in the planning phase so as to enable
other agents to accomplish their planning.
Communication between agents is accord with message transmission protocol
in communication language ACL. Specification. In particular, the communication
should be without delay, and the message sent to the same target will arrive
according to the sequence of the message sending.
The architecture of agents is given in Figure 14.13. Due to requirements of
negotiation between agents and judging consistency in constraint, in every agent
there are three independent threads, which are:
Planning thread: responsible for executing algorithm 14.6 for solving its own
planning problems.
Constraints maintenance thread: calculating the local transitive closure of the
action on its own actions set S, and judging consistency in the distributed
partial
order planning
Communication and Negotiation thread: responsible for sending action
constraints and accomplishing cooperation and coordination of actions between
agents.
Constraint
Thread
Planner
Thread
Plan=<S, B, O, L>
Communication
Thread
Agent2 Agent3More Agents....
Agent1
Agent Communication Channel
Figure 14.13. The architecture of planning agents
