Explaining interdependent action delays in multiagent plans execution

Abstract

In this paper we address the problem of diagnosing the execution of Multiagent Plans with interdependent action delays. To this end, we map our problem to the Model-Based Diagnosis setting, and solve it by devising a novel modeling and reasoning method to infer preferred diagnoses based on partial observation of the start and end times of plan actions. Interestingly, we show that the kind of problem we address can be seen as an extension to the well known disjunctive temporal problem with preferences, augmented with a (qualitative) Bayesian network that models dependencies among action delays. An extensive set of tests performed with a prototype implementation on two different problem domains proves the feasibility of the proposed methodology.