Planning with Concurrent Interacting Actions

Craig Boutilier, Ronen I. Brafman

Abstract: In order to generate plans for agents with multiple actuators or agent teams, we must be able to represent and plan using concurrent actions with interacting effects. Historically, this has been considered a challenging task that could require a temporal planner. We show that, with simple modifications, the STRIPS action representation language can be used to represent concurrent interacting actions. Moreover, current algorithms for partial-order planning require only small modifications in order to handle this language and produce coordinated multiagent plans. These results open the way to partial order planners for cooperative multiagent systems.