A unified approach to planning support in hierarchical coalitions

• Main Author: Siebra, Clauirton De Albuquerque
• Published: University of Edinburgh 2006
• Subjects: 006.3
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.661898

Hierarchical coalitions are organisations whose components carry out different planning and plan execution activities at each level. One of the principal aims of knowledge-based tools for coalitions is to support such components so that they are able to work synergically together, each of them accounting for part of the planning and execution process. This thesis analyses groups of requirements associated to the development joint human-agent planning agents, showing that they can be implemented, in a unified way, via a constraint-based ontology and associated functions. The constraints’ properties already have been used by several planning approaches as an option to improve their efficiency and expressiveness. In this work we demonstrate that such properties can also be employed to implement concepts, which are kept transparent to the planning mechanisms. Furthermore, the use of constraints provides several facilities to the implementation of advanced mechanisms associated to the human interaction, as also demonstrated here. The practical aspects of such approach are illustrated via a prototype that uses a disaster relief domain as a test-bed. The role of this prototype is to show: (1) the impact of collaborative concepts in the planning process; (2) the opportunities for human-agent interaction, and; (3) the easy customisation of agents through the definition of activity handlers and specific constraint managers. Finally, an additional domain associated to space applications is also discussed so that we can testify the generality of this approach.