Design of a Task Planning Conflict and Error Detection System with Active Protocols and Agents

Executive Summary In this research, an agent-based Conflict/Error Detection Protocol (CEDP) is developed to continuously detect conflict and error problems in a distributed collaborative task-planning environment. By applying Active Middleware architecture, the detection protocol can help detection agents and support their evaluation of the detection process, and exchange detection information among collaborative participants. A measure called " conflict-severity " is developed to evaluate propagated conflict situations and assess the seriousness of the conflict; and if justified, a possible detection. Experiments with CEDP have been run on three basic Co-net forms, linear, tree, and parallel. The experimental results show that the CEDP is able to detect conflict and error propagation in different task dependency networks. A well-design CEDP is important, because an effective communication mechanism to improve the quality of CE detection in a collaborative, distributed network will determine the benefit to the company.