Coordinating planning agents for moderately and tightly-coupled tasks

In many task-planning domains, dynamic assemblies of au-tonomous agents are replacing hierarchical organisations be-cause they promise more agility. In such assemblies, inter-dependent tasks might be given to different agents that each make a plan for their set of tasks. The feasibility of a joint plan for the total set of tasks, however, is likely to be en-dangered: Autonomous planning behaviour might result in individually constructed plans that are not jointly feasible. Therefore, (plan) coordination mechanisms have to be intro-duced to guarantee that even if each individual agent plans its part of the tasks independently from the others, the re-sult will be a feasible joint plan for the complete set of tasks. In previous work we have addressed a coordination mecha-nism for moderately-coupled tasks, i.e., tasks that are par