Achieving Global Coherence in Multi-Agent Caregiver Systems: Centralized versus Distributed Response Coordination in I.L.S.A

In order for multi-agent systems to exhibit global coherence the agents must coordinate their activities or be limited to a problem space in which activities are highly independent. In the elder care domain, global coherence across the agent system responsible for giving the care requires coordination if only because the different agents in the system interact over a set of shared resources, namely the individual for whom the system provides care and the fallback human caregivers. In this paper we explore the general coordination issue in the elder care problem space and discuss the response planning and coordination portions of the Independent LifeStyle Assistant TM agent system being developed at Honeywell.