COORDINATING AGENTS - An Analysis of Coordination in Supply-chain Management Tasks

Chetan Yadati, Cees Witteveen, Yingqian Zhang

2010

Abstract

A multi-agent planning problem consists of a set of activities that need to be planned by several agents. Here, plan coordination methods play an important role, since the independently generated plans by different agents can lead to an infeasible joint solution. We study one particular plan coordination approach, called coordination-by-design, which allows each agent to make its own plan completely independent of the others, while guaranteeing the feasibility of the combined plan of all the agents as a joint solution to the multi-agent planning problem. In this paper, we are interested in a class of multi-agent planning problems that arise in supply-chain management applications. Although the coordination problem in general is ∑_2^p -complete, it turns out for this special class, the complexity of coordination checking is polynomial and deciding a minimum coordination set is NP-complete. We develop a polynomial-time approximation algorithm to compute a sufficient coordination set.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Yadati C., Witteveen C. and Zhang Y. (2010). COORDINATING AGENTS - An Analysis of Coordination in Supply-chain Management Tasks . In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 2: ICAART, ISBN 978-989-674-022-1, pages 218-223. DOI: 10.5220/0002734002180223

in Bibtex Style

@conference{icaart10,
author={Chetan Yadati and Cees Witteveen and Yingqian Zhang},
title={COORDINATING AGENTS - An Analysis of Coordination in Supply-chain Management Tasks},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 2: ICAART,},
year={2010},
pages={218-223},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0002734002180223},
isbn={978-989-674-022-1},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 2: ICAART,
TI - COORDINATING AGENTS - An Analysis of Coordination in Supply-chain Management Tasks
SN - 978-989-674-022-1
AU - Yadati C.
AU - Witteveen C.
AU - Zhang Y.
PY - 2010
SP - 218
EP - 223
DO - 10.5220/0002734002180223