Multi-Agent Mission Coordination via Negotiation

This paper is intended to give an intuitive overview of the operations of MASA-CIRCA, the Multi-Agent SelfAdaptive Cooperative Intelligent Real-Time Control Architecture. While individual CIRCA agents have been under development for some time, we have only recently begun developing the architecture’s multiagent capabilities. This paper briefly describes the high-level negotiation functions that MASA-CIRCA currently uses to coordinate multiple agents, in the context of an implemented demonstration scenario. As an architecture for autonomous control, CIRCA is distinguished by its strong emphasis on real-time performance guarantees. Individual CIRCA agents, as illustrated in Figure 1, combine two levels of planning and automatic controller synthesis modules with a plan executive (the Real-Time Subsystem) that is responsible for reactively executing automatically-generated control rules in hard real time. CIRCA is designed to adapt, on the fly, to changes in its environment and its capabilities by building and executing new reactive plans. Because CIRCA reasons explicitly about the timing constraints that its reactive plans must meet, and because it plan executive provides rigidly predictable performance, CIRCA supports the performance guarantees required for autonomous systems applications in mission-critical real-time domains. In the new multi-agent versions of CIRCA, we are extending these real-time performance characteristics to a team of coordinating CIRCA agents, each controlling a separate platform (e.g., a team of unmanned combat air vehicles, or UCAVs). As shown in Figure 2, the CIRCA agents communicate and negotiate at all levels of the architecture to coordinate their activities. The AMP is responsible for the highest-level conAdaptive Mission Planner