Frank von Martial
Lecture Notes in Computer Science (Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence) 610
Springer-Verlag
1992
This book deals with an important topic in distributed AI: the coordination of autonomous agents' activities. It provides a framework for modelling agents with planning and communicative competence. Important issues in the book are:
- How to recognize and reconcile conflicting intentions among a collection of agents.
- How to recognize and take advantage of favorable interactions.
- How to enable individual agents to represent and reason about the actions, plans, and knowledge of other agents in order to coordinate with them.
- When to call a set of plans coordinated and what operations are possible to transform uncoordinated plans into coordinated ones.
- How to enable agents to communicate and interact: what communication languages or protocols to use, and what and when to communicate.
The book is clearly written with many examples and background material.
