Multi-Agent Planning with Decommitment∗

One of the problems that must be solved during coalition operations is the planning problem: finding a course of actions for the operation. Knowledge-based planning is a technique that can be used to address this problem. However, traditional planning has focussed on the finding of a plan that achieves a given goal or accomplishes a given task. During a coalition operation such a plan may need to be agreed between the different parties involved in the coalition. In this paper we shall describe an approach that can be used for finding an agreed plan. This plan will include a set of decommitment rules allowing participants to specify conditions under which they are allowed to deviate from the agreed course of action. The proposed algorithm can be used as the basis for an automated planner, but it should also be usable in a mixedinitiative setting. ∗Sponsored by the European Research Office of the US Army under grant number W911NF-08-1-0041. The authors’ organizations and research sponsors are authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints and on-line copies for their purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation hereon. The views and conclusions contained herein are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of other parties.