Coordination of Highly Contingent Plans

Conventional military planning systems construct plans with very limited flexibility. In the future, military plans will evolve into a much more expressive, contingent form. This paper describes how Honeywell's distributed coordinator agents reason about complex domains to construct and execute highly contingent plans. The agents operate in a very dynamic environment in which complex hierarchical tasks can arrive unpredictably and the agents have to build coordinated joint plans on the fly, while execution proceeds. Using carefully limited forms of inter-agent communication, the agents develop agreements on their future coordinated behavior and rely on those agreements to build highly contingent plans (partial policies) that specify what actions they should take in a wide variety of possible futures. As mission execution proceeds and the tasks yield varying outcomes, the agents must rapidly, continually coordinate and adapt their plans. The result is a distributed multi-agent system capable of building and flexibly executing complex, highly-contingent coordinated mission plans