Multi-agent coordination by temporal plan fusion: Application to combat search and rescue

Coordination of actions and plans that must be achieved by multiple agents is one of the most difficult tasks in the multi-agent domain. In order to work together and achieve a common goal, agents need to coordinate their plans in a way that guarantees, if possible, the success of each individual agent plan. In this work, we propose a temporal fusion mechanism that allows a set of agents to fuse their plans and generate a global coordinated plan. First, we define a temporal plan as a set of temporally constrained actions. The fusion of several temporal plans is a temporal plan, which can be executed by several agents. The proposed framework is applied to a Combat Search and Rescue application.