This book deals with an important topic in distributed AI:
the coordination of autonomous agents' activities. It
provides a framework for modelling agents with planning and
communicative competence.
Important issues in the book are:
- How to recognize and reconcile conflicting intentions
among a collection of agents.
- How to recognize and take advantage of favorable
interactions.
- How to enable individual agents to represent and reason
about the actions, plans, and knowledge of other agents in
order to coordinate with them.
- When to call a set of plans coordinated and what
operations are possible to transform uncoordinated plans
into coordinated ones.
- How to enable agents to communicate and interact: what
communication languages or protocols to use, and what and
when to communicate.
The book is clearly written with many examples and
background material.