Decentralized Multi-agent Plan Repair in Dynamic Environments
This addresses coordination challenges for cooperative multi-agent teams in dynamic environments, offering a practical improvement.
The paper tackles the problem of high communication overhead in decentralized multi-agent systems when joint plans fail, showing that plan repair reduces communication complexity compared to replanning from scratch.
Achieving joint objectives by teams of cooperative planning agents requires significant coordination and communication efforts. For a single-agent system facing a plan failure in a dynamic environment, arguably, attempts to repair the failed plan in general do not straightforwardly bring any benefit in terms of time complexity. However, in multi-agent settings the communication complexity might be of a much higher importance, possibly a high communication overhead might be even prohibitive in certain domains. We hypothesize that in decentralized systems, where coordination is enforced to achieve joint objectives, attempts to repair failed multi-agent plans should lead to lower communication overhead than replanning from scratch. The contribution of the presented paper is threefold. Firstly, we formally introduce the multi-agent plan repair problem and formally present the core hypothesis underlying our work. Secondly, we propose three algorithms for multi-agent plan repair reducing the problem to specialized instances of the multi-agent planning problem. Finally, we present results of experimental validation confirming the core hypothesis of the paper.