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<article-title>Distributed Management of Flexible Times Schedules</article-title></title-group>

<author><a href="mailto:sfs@cs.cmu.edu"><name>Stephen F. Smith</name></a></author>
<aff>The Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University 5000 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh PA 15024</aff>

<author><a href="mailto:anthonyg@cs.cmu.edu"><name>Anthony Gallagher</name></a></author>
<aff>The Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University 5000 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh PA 15024</aff>

<author><a href="mailto:wizim@cs.cmu.edu"><name>Terry Zimmerman</name></a></author>
<aff>The Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University 5000 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh PA 15024</aff>

<author><a href="mailto:laurabar@cs.cmu.edu"><name>Laura Barbulescu</name></a></author>
<aff>The Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University 5000 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh PA 15024</aff>

<author><a href="mailto:zbr@cs.cmu.edu"><name>Zachary Rubinstein</name></a></author>
<aff>The Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University 5000 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh PA 15024</aff>
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<title>ABSTRACT</title>
<p>We consider the problem of managing schedules in an uncertain,
distributed environment. We assume a team of collaborative
agents, each responsible for executing a portion
of a globally pre-established schedule, but none possessing
a global view of either the problem or solution. The goal
is to maximize the joint quality obtained from the activities
executed by all agents, given that, during execution, unexpected
events will force changes to some prescribed activities
and reduce the utility of executing others. We describe
an agent architecture for solving this problem that couples
two basic mechanisms: (1) a "flexible times" representation
of the agent's schedule (using a Simple Temporal Network)
and (2) an incremental rescheduling procedure. The former
hedges against temporal uncertainty by allowing execution
to proceed from a set of feasible solutions, and the latter acts
to revise the agent's schedule when execution is forced outside
of this set of solutions or when execution events reduce
the expected value of this feasible solution set. Basic coordination
with other agents is achieved simply by communicating
schedule changes to those agents with inter-dependent
activities. Then, as time permits, the core local problem
solving infra-structure is used to drive an inter-agent option
generation and query process, aimed at identifying opportunities
for solution improvement through joint change. Using
a simulator to model the environment, we compare the performance
of our multi-agent system with that of an expected
optimal (but non-scalable) centralized MDP solver.</p>
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