Gossiping Based Distributed Plan Monitoring

Joint plan execution is gaining momentum due to its benefits in terms of cost effectiveness and operational agility. In this paper, we introduce a lightweight gossip based multi-agent distributed protocol for plan execution monitoring in a dynamic environment characterized by unreliable communication links and exogenous events. The information obtained from the monitoring process can be used as support for detecting plan deviations and applying corrective measures. The contribution of this paper consists in the elaboration of an agent centric information sharing mechanism that is resilient to adverse changes in the execution environment by exhibiting a high degree of tolerance to communication errors. The distributed monitoring procedure is elaborated along with a relevant case study and experimental results.