Motion Planning in A Society of Mobile Agents

Groups or societies of agents may collaborate on a common goal and thereby achieve more than by working individually. This paper discusses the use of societal theories to model the carrying out of a plan by a group of agents. We focus on plans that relate to agent motion since the low-level aspects of such plans are well understood and motion provides clear criteria for successful planning. We use statecharts to represent these plans, which are hierarchically structured and require concurrent behavior. We represent norms as statements in deontic logic, and we annotate statechart plans with such statements to indicate that certain norms apply to certain groups. In fact, the transitions in a statechart are often naturally interpreted in a normative way. Using deontic logic allows us to distinguish ideal behavior from actual behavior that violates norms and hence to represent fault tolerance. The follow section introduces societal norms and relates them to motion planning. Section 3 presents statecharts and introduces deontic statecharts. Section 4 is an extended example, and Section 5 discusses planning, specifically, how a successful multi-agent motion plan of the form we discuss may be constructed. Section 6 is the conclusion.