We-Plan: A software system for Mixed-Initiative Distributed Simultaneous (MDS) planning

Abstract

A real-world technical challenge, called Mixed-Initiative Distributed Simultaneous (MDS) planning, has been introduced, explored and documented in a previous publication [4]. That work presented a prototype system called We-Plan, as a preliminary yet effective multi-agent solution to help human users carry out MDS planning in complex dynamic application domains. At this time, the We-Plan system has gone through a significant improvement and its functionality has reached an operational level that is beyond simple proof-of-concept, i.e., multiple geographically separated users engaged in a MDS planning mission may employ this software system to generate and manage their task plans, allocate selected tasks to other users based on their capability and availability, keep track of task execution status, and maintain an effective coordination and a high level shared situational awareness among all the mission participants. This paper further discusses the real-world challenges in MDS planning and presents the We-Plan solution in detail, including its key components and important software capabilities that enable effective, efficient and practical MDS planning in a representative use case.