Integration of a PDDL planning framework into the multi-agent simulation system LAMPSys

LAMPSys is a general purpose multi-agent simulation platform that has successfully been used to simulate real-world domains during the last years. A hierarchical agent organization encapsulates decision making by planning centrally for a group of agents. This work introduces a specification framework for the generation of PDDL planning instances from a leader agents world model. The modeling of the generation process simplifies the integration of different planning domains into LAMPSys, since general operators and specifications can be reused. Another contribution is a plan post-processing that supports plan monitoring. The temporal synchronization of actions in PDDL plans with absolute points in time is extended by a qualitative synchronization with a partial order of actions. In some situations, this approach improves the parallelism of a plan significantly. Finally, the application of PDDL planning to the real-world domain of medical evacuation is evaluated.