Plan Merging in Multi-Agent Systems

I'll send you the complete printed thesis (208 pages) for 15 euros, but you can also download a digital version (without the nice illustrations by Welmoed Kreb).

Contents

• Preface
  • The `Collective Agent-Based Systems' (CABS) projects
  • Acknowledgments
  
  
• Introduction
  • Inter-organizational coordination
  • Coordinated planning
  • Research contributions
  • Overview
  
  
• From planning to multi-agent planning
  • The classical planning problem
  • Refinement planning
  • Extended planning problems
  • and for agents
    • Problem definition
    • Complexity of multi-agent planning
    • Centralized planning for multiple agents
    • Explicit distributed planning
    • Implicit distributed planning
    • Other related work in distributed artificial intelligence
  • Challenges
  
  
• The action resource formalism
  • Resources
  • Actions
    • Uniqueness of resources
  • Planning
    • Planning problem description
    • Plans
  • Operational semantics
    • Parallel and sequential composition
    • Plans
  • Constraints
  
  
• Plan reduction and plan merging
  • Plan reduction
    • Splitting plans
    • Plan joining
    • Plan reduction
  • Plan merging
    • Multi-agent planning problem
    • Parallel composition of plans
    • Plan merging
  
  
• Algorithms for merging multiple plans
  • From theorem to algorithm
  • Circular dependencies
  • Ground plan merging
    • The problem
    • The algorithm
  • Flexible plan merging
    • The problem
    • The algorithm
  • Computational complexity
  
  
• Empirical results
  • Research questions and expected results
    • The performance of the plan merging algorithm
    • Utility analysis for taxi companies
  • Data set and assumptions
    • Descriptives
    • Assumptions
  • Distance-time function approximation
  • Implementation
  • Results
    • Influence of the date
    • Influence of the capacity of the taxis
    • Influence of the allowed detour distance
    • Influence of the allowed time margins for passengers
    • Influence of the number of agents and taxis
    • Run-time analysis
    • Improvement of the efficiency
    • Any-time behavior
  • Discussion of results
  
  
• Conclusions and perspectives
  • Conclusions
  • Future work
    • Extensions of the formalism
    • Extensions of the plan merging algorithm
    • Further experiments
    • More advanced multi-agent planning algorithms
  
  
• A. Mathematical notation and definitions
  • S-ranked alphabet, terms and formulas
  • Semantics of formulas in terms of a many-sorted algebra
  • Resource logic with constraints
  • Plan reduction and plan merging for embedded plans
  • Complexity of the subplan reduction problem
  • Plan-merging algorithms in more detail
    • Ground plan merging
    • Flexible plan merging
  
  
• Bibliography
• Summary

I used the following TRAIL thesis LaTeX style files for the layout.

I'll send you the complete printed thesis (208 pages) for 15 euros, but you can also download a digital version (without the nice illustrations by Welmoed Kreb).