A multi-agent coordinated planning approach for deadline required emergency response tasks

This study investigates the emergency decision-making problem in a multi-agent system. Departments are modeled as agents to perform coordinated planning to obtain a global action plan with a short execution time constrained by a prescribed deadline. A novel multi-agent planning approach is proposed to coordinate for the solution among agents in the system. The approach consists of two stages. For the first stage, a coordinated planning and scheduling method is designed to generate a candidate global action plan. In this plan, durative actions are assigned to proper time intervals with the consideration of temporal relationships among agents. For the second stage, a coordination mechanism based on local heuristics is proposed to reduce the global time cost of the candidate plan to satisfy the deadline. An experimental study of emergency evacuation problem is conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach.