Michael Georgeff

AAAI Conference 1984 Conference Paper

A Theory of Action for MultiAgent Planning

• Michael Georgeff

A theory of action suitable for reasoning about events in multiagent or dynamically changing environments is presented. A device called a process model is used to represent the observable behavior of an agent in performing an action. This model is more general than previous models of action, allowing sequencing, selection, nondeterminism, iteration, and parallelism to be represented. It is shown how this model can be utilized in synthesizing plans and reasoning about concurrency. In particular, conditions are derived for determining whether or not concurrent actions are free from mutual interference. It is also indicated how this theory provides a basis for understanding and reasoning about action sentences in both natural and programming languages.

AAAI Conference 1983 Conference Paper

Communication and Interaction in Multi-Agent Planning

• Michael Georgeff

A method for synthesizing multi-agent plans from simpler single-agent plans is described. The idea is to insert communication acts into the single-agent plans so that agents can synchronize activities and avoid harmful interactions. Unlike most previous planning systems, actions are represented by sequesnces of states, rather than as simple state change operators. This allows the expression of more complex kinds of interaction than would otherwise be possible. An efficient method of interaction and safety analysis is then developed and used to identify critical regions in the plans. An essential feature of the method is that the analysis is performed without generating all possible interleavings of the plans, thus avoiding a combinatorial explosion. Finally, commiunication primitives are inserted into the plans and a supervisor process created to handle synchronization.

IJCAI Conference 1983 Conference Paper

Procedural Expert Systems

• Michael Georgeff
• Umberto Bonollo