Multi-Agent Planning under Local LTL Specifications and Event-Based Synchronization

TL;DR

This paper presents a scalable multi-agent planning method under local LTL specifications that uses event-based synchronization to reduce computational complexity and adapt to different agent step durations.

Contribution

It introduces an iterative, finite horizon planning approach with event-based synchronization for multi-agent systems with LTL goals, improving efficiency over traditional centralized methods.

Findings

The proposed approach reduces computational complexity compared to centralized planning.

Event-based synchronization allows efficient handling of agents with different step durations.

The method guarantees eventual satisfaction of specifications under certain assumptions.

Abstract

We study the problem of plan synthesis for multi-agent systems, to achieve complex, high-level, long-term goals that are assigned to each agent individually. As the agents might not be capable of satisfying their respective goals by themselves, requests for other agents' collaborations are a part of the task descriptions. We consider that each agent is modeled as a discrete state-transition system and its task specification takes a form of a linear temporal logic formula, which may contain requirements and constraints on the other agent's behavior. A traditional automata-based approach to multi-agent plan synthesis from such specifications builds on centralized team planning and full team synchronization after each agents' discrete step, and thus suffers from extreme computational demands. We aim at reducing the computational complexity by decomposing the plan synthesis problem into finite horizon planning problems that are solved iteratively, upon the run of the agents. As opposed to full synchronization, we introduce an event-based synchronization that allows our approach to efficiently adapt to different time durations of different agents' discrete steps. We discuss the correctness of the solution and find assumptions, under which the proposed iterative algorithm leads to provable eventual satisfaction of the desired specifications.