Agile Planning for Real-World Disaster Response

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We consider a setting where an agent-based planner instructs teams of human emergency responders to perform tasks in the real world. Due to uncertainty in the environment and the inability of the planner to consider all human preferences and all attributes of the real-world, humans may reject plans computed by the agent. A naive solution that replans given a rejection is inefficient and does not guarantee the new plan will be acceptable. Hence, we propose a new model re-planning problem using a Multi-agent Markov Decision Process that integrates potential rejections as part of the planning process and propose a novel algorithm to efficiently solve this new model. We empirically evaluate our algorithm and show that it outperforms current benchmarks. Our algorithm is also shown to perform better in pilot studies with real humans.

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Feng Wu, Sarvapali D. Ramchurn, Wenchao Jiang, Joel E. Fischer, Tom Rodden, Nicholas R. Jennings. Agile Planning for Real-World Disaster Response. In Proceedings of the 24th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), pages 132-138, Buenos Aires, Argentina, July 2015.
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@inproceedings{WRJijcai15,
 address = {Buenos Aires, Argentina},
 author = {Feng Wu and Sarvapali D. Ramchurn and Wenchao Jiang and Joel E. Fischer and Tom Rodden and Nicholas R. Jennings},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the 24th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI)},
 month = {July},
 pages = {132-138},
 title = {Agile Planning for Real-World Disaster Response},
 year = {2015}
}