Publisher's Synopsis
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.
