CASCADE: Cascaded Scoped Communication for Multi-Agent Re-planning in Disrupted Industrial Environments

Mingjie Bi

Keywords: Industrial disruption replanning, Multi-agent coordination, Budgeted communication, Scoped negotiation, Contract net protocol, Manufacturing rescheduling, Supply-chain disruption response, Robust planning under uncertainty

TL;DR: CASCADE adaptively expands who communicates—via gate-triggered, contract-based negotiation—so industrial multi-agent replanning remains feasible and auditable under hard time and message budgets.

Abstract: Industrial disruption replanning demands multi-agent coordination under strict latency and communication budgets, where disruptions propagate through tightly coupled physical dependencies and rapidly invalidate baseline schedules and commitments. Existing coordination schemes often treat communication as either effectively free (broadcast-style escalation) or fixed in advance (hand-tuned neighborhoods), both of which are brittle once the disruption footprint extends beyond a local region. We present CASCADE, a budgeted replanning mechanism that makes communication scope explicit and auditable rather than fixed or implicit. Each agent maintains an explicit knowledge base, solves role-conditioned local decision problems to revise commitments, and coordinates through lightweight contract primitives whose footprint expands only when local validation indicates that the current scope is insufficient. This design separates a unified agent substrate (Knowledge Base / Decision Manager / Communication Manager) from a scoped interaction layer that controls who is contacted, how far coordination propagates, and when escalation is triggered under explicit budgets. We evaluate CASCADE on disrupted manufacturing and supply-chain settings using unified diagnostics intended to test a mechanism-design claim---whether explicit scope control yields useful quality--latency--communication trade-offs and improved robustness under uncertainty---rather than to provide a complete algorithmic ranking.

Track: Long Paper

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Submission Number: 89