Coordination and Control of Hierarchically Organized Interacting Agents

Authors

  • Sunandita Patra Department of Computer Science, University of Maryland, College Park
  • Paolo Traverso
  • Malik Ghallab
  • Dana Nau

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.32473/flairs.v34i1.128541

Keywords:

communicating components, input output automata, controller synthesis, hierarchical agents

Abstract

The coordination and control of hierarchically organized interacting agents is an important issue in many applications, e.g., harbor or warehouse automation. A formalism of agents as hierarchical input/output automata is proposed. A system of interacting agents is modeled as the parallel composition of their automata. We extend the usual parallel composition operation of I/O automata with a hierarchical composition operation for refining abstract tasks into lower-level subtasks. We provide an algorithm to synthesize hierarchically organized controllers to coordinate the agents' interactions in order to drive the system toward desired states.
Our main contribution regards the formal definition, the representation, the theorems about its properties (i.e., the parallel and hierarchical composition are distributive operations), and the synthesis algorithm, proved to be complete and correct.

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Published

18-04-2021

How to Cite

Patra, S., Traverso, P., Ghallab, M., & Nau, D. (2021). Coordination and Control of Hierarchically Organized Interacting Agents. The International FLAIRS Conference Proceedings, 34. https://doi.org/10.32473/flairs.v34i1.128541

Issue

Section

Special Track: Autonomous Robots and Agents