A distributed CSP approach for collaborative planning systems

Distributed or multi-agent planning extends classical AI planning to domains where several agents can plan and act together. There exist many recent developments in this discipline that range over different approaches for distributed planning algorithms, distributed plan execution processes or communication protocols among agents. One of the key issues about distributed planning is that it is the most appropriate way to tackle certain kind of planning problems, specially those where a centralized solving is unfeasible. In this paper we present a new planning framework aimed at solving planning problems in inherently distributed domains where agents have a collection of private data which cannot share with other agents. However, collaboration is required since agents are unable to accomplish its own tasks alone or, at least, can accomplish its tasks better when working with others. Our proposal motivates a new planning scheme based on a distributed heuristic search and a constraint programming resolution process.