Partial-Order Planning with Concurrent Interacting Actions

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that simple modifications to the STRIPS language and partial-order planning algorithms enable effective planning with concurrent interacting actions, facilitating multiagent system control.

Contribution

It introduces POMP, a sound and complete partial-order planner for concurrent interacting actions, extending existing planners with minimal changes.

Findings

STRIPS can represent interacting actions with simple modifications.

Partial-order planning algorithms can be adapted for multiagent domains.

POMP enables centralized control of cooperative multiagent systems.

Abstract

In order to generate plans for agents with multiple actuators, agent teams, or distributed controllers, we must be able to represent and plan using concurrent actions with interacting effects. This has historically been considered a challenging task requiring a temporal planner with the ability to reason explicitly about time. We show that with simple modifications, the STRIPS action representation language can be used to represent interacting actions. Moreover, algorithms for partial-order planning require only small modifications in order to be applied in such multiagent domains. We demonstrate this fact by developing a sound and complete partial-order planner for planning with concurrent interacting actions, POMP, that extends existing partial-order planners in a straightforward way. These results open the way to the use of partial-order planners for the centralized control of cooperative multiagent systems.