Multiagent planning using a reason maintenance system

The article presents an application of reason maintenance systems for distributed reasoning about actions in multiagent planning. An important problem in multiagent planning is reasoning about shared resources. An action proposed by one agent on a shared resource may, in general, affect the status of the partial plans of other agents. The article maintains the dependencies of states of resources on actions. It employs a distributed truth maintenance system. It records the negotiations in the dependency net and demonstrates how distributed backtracking can be performed in case of dead ends or inconsistencies arising in the local/global worlds