Project code: TaCoNa
Research group: Multi-agent and Adaptive Computation (SEN4)

Project coordinator: Han La Poutré

Whenever independent, non-cooperative actors jointly have to solve a complex task, they need to coordinate their efforts in order to guarantee a correct solution. Typical examples of such task coordination problems are supply chain management, multi-modal transportation and patient-centered health care management. Common elements in such problems are a complex task, i.e., a set of interdependent subtasks, and a set of competitive actors. Solving a task coordination problem first of all requires to solve a task allocation problem (how to assign competitive actors to the subtasks). As a result, each of the actors will receive a set of subtasks to complete and will need to make a plan for this set of tasks. Therefore, also a plan coordination problem has to be solved (how to ensure that a joint plan always can be composed, whatever plan is chosen by the individual actors). The aim of this project is to address this task coordination problem by:

• extending a market-based approach to solve the task allocation problem for complex task specifications;
• extending a multi-agent planning approach to solve the plan coordination problem for complex task specifications;
• integrating both approaches to deal with the problem how to interleave the plan coordination and task allocation process to find less costly solutions to the problem.

Two intended application domains will be used as guiding cases: a multi-modal logistic problem, where several packages have to be transported and a patient health care problem, where a sequence of treatments for a set of patients has to be assigned to different parties.

Partner in the project is Delft University of Technology (TUDelft). CWI is focusing especially on the market-based task allocation, whereas TUDelft is focusing especially on the plan coordination problem.

Member
Mengxiao Wu, Mathijs de Weerdt, Han La Poutré.