Coordinating Plans of Autonomous Agents

This book deals with an important topic in distributed AI: the co-ordination of autonomous agents' activities. It provides a framework for modelling agents with planning and communicative competence. important issues in the book are: How to recognize and reconcile conflicting intentions among a collection of agents. - How to recognize and take advantage of favorable interations. - How to enable individual agents to represent and reason about the actions, plans, and knowledge of other agents in order to co-ordinate with them. - When to call a set of plans co-ordinated and what operations are possible to transform unco-ordinated plans into co-ordinated ones. How to enable agents to communicate and interact: what communication languages or protocols to use, and what and when to communicate. The book is clearly written with many examples and background material.