IMPACTing SHOP: Foundations for integrating HTN Planning and Multi-Agency

Abstract

In this paper we describe a formalism for integrating the SHOP HTN planning system with the IMPACT multi-agent environment. Our formalism provides an agentized adaptation of the SHOP planning algorithm that takes advantage of IMPACT's capabilities for interacting with external agents, performing mixed symbolic/numeric computations, and making queries to distributed, heterogeneous information sources (such as arbitrary legacy and/or specialized data structures or external databases). We show that this agentized version of SHOP will preserve soundness and completeness if certain conditions are met. (This technical report is the updated version of CS-TR-4085) (Also cross-referenced as UMIACS-TR-2000-02)