Collaborative Planning With Privacy

Collaboration among organizations or individuals is common. While these participants are often unwilling to share all their information with each other, some information sharing is unavoidable when achieving a common goal. The need to share information and the desire to keep it private/ secret are two competing notions which affect the outcome of a collaboration. This paper proposes a formal model of collaboration which addresses privacy/secrecy concerns. We draw on the notion of a plan which originates in the AI literature. We consider transition systems in which actions have pre- and post-conditions of the same size. We show it is PSPACE-complete to decide whether a given such system protects the privacy/secrecy of its participants and whether it contains a plan leading from a given initial state to a desired goal state.