MAPL: a Framework for Multiagent Planning with Partially Ordered Temporal Plans

This paper discusses the specifics of planning in multiagent environments. It presents the formal framework MAPL (“maple”) for describing multiagent planning domains. MAPL allows to describe both qualitative and quantitative temporal relations among events, thus subsuming the temporal models of both PDDL 2.1 and POP. Other features are different levels of control over actions, modeling of agents’ ignorance of facts, and plan synchronization with communicative actions. For global planning in multiagent domains, the paper describes a novel forward-search algorithm producing MAPL’s partially ordered temporal plans. Finally, the paper describes a general distributed algorithm scheme for solving MAPL problems with several coordinating planners. The different contributions intend to provide a simple, yet expressive standard for describing multiagent planning domains and algorithms that in the future might allow cross-evaluation of Multiagent Planning algorithms on standardized benchmarks.