Soutenance de thèse d'Adnan M. Hashmi - Mardi 24 Janvier

Bonjour,

J'ai le plaisir de vous inviter à la soutenance de ma thèse intitulée

"An Agent Oriented Programming Language integrating Temporal Planning and
the Plan Coordination Mechanisms".

ainsi qu'au pot qui suivra.

La soutenance aura lieu le mardi 24 janvier 2012 à 10h00 sur le Campus de
Jussieu en salle 105 couloir 25-26 (1er étage).

Composition du Jury
=========================

Rapporteurs :

Mme. Adina Magda FLOREA, Professeur à l'Université Politehnica de
Bucarest
M. René MANDIAU, Professeur à l'Université de Valenciennes et du
Hainaut-Cambrésis

Examinateurs :

M. Rachid ALAMI, Directeur de recherche CNRS au LAAS - Toulouse
M. Humbert FIORINO, Maître de conférence à l'Université Joseph Fourier
- Grenoble
M. Nicolas MAUDET, Professeur à l'Université Pierre et Marie Curie

Directrice de thèse :

Mme. Amal EL FALLAH SEGHROUCHNI, Professeur à l'Université Pierre et
Marie Curie

Résumé
============

Over the years a lot of research has been carried out on designing new
languages and platforms to program intelligent and autonomous agents. As a
result, now we have the necessary tools available to develop autonomous,
intelligent, adaptive, communicating and mobile agents. Most of these
languages do not give agents the ability to plan ahead. But, sometimes the
execution of actions without planning results in the inability to achieve
the goals. Moreover, the duration of agent actions and the uncertainty of
the environment has not been taken into account in the planning based
agent oriented programming (AOP) languages.

This thesis tries to fill this gap by proposing an AOP language P-CLAIM
that endows the agents with planning capability. We are interested in the
temporal planning of on the fly goals having different priorities. A
coherrent framework is proposed in which agents are able to generate,
execute and monitor their temporal plans. A plan is repaired if some
unanticipated changes in the environment cause the plan to become
unfeasible. Moreover, the proposed framework creates a balance between
reactivity and deliberation.

Handling and the coordination of plans for the achievement of different
priority goals have not been discussed in either of the multi-agent
planning and AOP languages communities. So this thesis also proposes
coordination mechanisms for the plans of different priorities in two
different scenarios. In the first scenario, that we call
Proactive-Reactive Coordination Problem (PRCP), an agent has to modify its
temporal plan in order to remove any conflicts with the plan of another
agent having higher priority. This thesis proposes a plan merging
algorithm supported by a sound plan repairing technique to solve this
problem.

In the second scenario, that we call Coordinated Planning Problem (CPP),
an agent has to compute a plan for the achievement of its own goals, but
without violating the constraints of another agent's higher priority plan,
and utilizing where possible the cooperative opportunities offered by the
latter. This thesis presents two multi-agent planners to solve this
planning problem. First planner Coordinated-Sapa is an extension of the
well known temporal planner Sapa, and it solves CPP for the temporal
domains. The second planner µ-SATPLAN is an extension of the well known
classical planner SATPLAN, and it solves CPP for non-temporal classical
domains. The techniques are presented for both the planners to handle the
negative (conflicting situations) as well as positive interactions
(cooperative situations).

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Bien Cordialement,
Adnan Hashmi