Organization responsible: Delft University of Technology

People involved:

• Cees Witteveen
• Renze Steenhuisen

Project description:

We investigate the requirements that have to be met and the methods to be used by distributed autonomous systems that have to perform a common task requiring a set of interrelated services. Each of these systems (agents) in the grid is able to offer a subset of specific services.  The completion of the task requires a careful planning of the services of each of the agents. Being autonomous entities, agents, however, have little or no means to influence the policies or planning of other agents. The goal of this research track is to develop protocols to coordinate heterogeneous, autonomous agents each having been assigned a set of services to achieve a joint task. These protocols on the one hand have to guarantee the completion of the common task, while on the other hand the planning autonomy of the systems has to be respected. Special attention will be given to the fine-tuning of protocols to the interaction possibilities between the service agents and robustness of the resulting protocols.

We therefore aim at

• the specification of robust protocols that ensure coordination even if components of the common task are changed or changes in the collection of participating agents occur.  
• the application of protocols that can be used to integrate existing single agent planning tools into a coordinated multi-agent planning tool.
• in the interest of robust and real-time coordination in service grids, the design and application of hybrid metaheuristics in a planning & scheduling environment. These hybrid techniques pragmatically combine current state-of-the-art search planning techniques to obtain optimal in-time solutions and plan changes.