Planning for Coordination and Coordination for Planning

Abstract

Except in very controlled or fortuitous circumstances, good coordination between agents does not spontaneously occur. In general, agents need to plan for coordination, anticipating how their activities can affect each other and choosing actions that dovetail well together to achieve their separate and common goals. Of course, this is easier said than done, since the potential space of agents' action and interaction sequences to consider is intractable. I discuss some technologies that make it practical to plan for good coordination by exploiting algorithmic, representational, and problem-specific structure. Furthermore, when conducted by the involved agents, the processes for planning coordination need to be coordinated themselves. Toward this end, I also outline meta-level strategies for coordinating the agents' planning processes.