Authors:
Michal Štolba
;
Michaela Urbanovská
;
Daniel Fišer
and
Antonín Komenda
Affiliation:
Department of Computer Science, Czech Technical University in Prague, Karlovo náměstí 13, 121 35, Prague and Czech Republic
Keyword(s):
Multi-agent Planning, Distributed Search, Distributed Heuristic Computation.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Agents
;
Artificial Intelligence
;
Distributed Problem Solving
;
Formal Methods
;
Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics
;
Intelligent Control Systems and Optimization
;
Planning and Scheduling
;
Simulation and Modeling
;
Symbolic Systems
Abstract:
Similarly to classical planning, heuristics play a crucial role in Multi-Agent Planning (MAP). Especially, the question of how to compute a distributed heuristic so that the information is shared effectively has been studied widely. This question becomes even more intriguing if we aim to preserve some degree of privacy, or admissibility of the heuristic. The works published so far aimed mostly at providing an ad-hoc distribution protocol for a particular heuristic. In this work, we propose a general framework for distributing heuristic computation based on the technique of cost partitioning. This allows the agents to compute their heuristic values separately and the global heuristic value as an admissible sum. We evaluate the presented techniques in comparison to the baseline of locally computed heuristics and show that the approach based on cost partitioning improves the heuristic quality over the baseline.