Formalizing Multi-Agent Planning Domains with Sorted Actions

A formal multi-agent planning domain framework based on planning via model checking is proposed. Many aspects of multi-agent planning domains such as the non-determinism, concurrency, collaboration, and interaction are taken into account. The global plan is generated by planning via model checking, and it is executed concurrently by a group of heterogenous agents. All actions for the group of agents are sorted by the defined action types which actually indicate the capabilities of each agent or a subgroup of agents. The global plan contains the sorting information for each action so that all actions may be executed in parallel if it is possible. For demonstrating the idea, a domain description language is proposed, and a planner based on model checking and a plan executor based on workpool model are implemented. The sorted action framework gracefully accommodates all these features such as nondeterminism, concurrency, collaboration, and interaction without sacrificing the simplification of the domain description