A Method to Integrate Planning and Coordination

Multi-agent planning involves finding a plan for each agent in a group where the goals, the actions and the initial resources are distributed over these autonomous agents. An algorithm is given for multi-agent planning that constructs coordinated agent plans distributedly. Instead of designing a planning algorithm and a coordination method separately, this algorithm integrates planning and coordination. The presented multi-agent planning algorithm is based on the idea of several forward heuristic planners that run in parallel. These planners are coordinated by communicating side-products and services via a blackboard.