@InProceedings{chen06a,
  author =	 {Wei Chen and Keith S. Decker},
  title =	 {Analyzing Characteristics of Task Structures to
                  Develop {GPGP} Coordination Mechanisms},
  booktitle =	 {Proceedings of the Fifth International Joint
                  Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent
                  Systems},
  crossref =	 {aamas06},
  pages =	 {662--670},
  year =	 2006,
  abstract =	 {Previous research about multi-agent coordination has
                  con- centrated at a high level, e.g. developing
                  communication protocols for coordination,
                  constructing special purpose agents to dictate the
                  coordination behaviors of an entire system, or
                  associating rules or coordination mechanisms with
                  every agent to achieve cooperative behaviors. Much
                  less research addresses multi-agent coordination at
                  a low level: evaluating the eects of agents' task
                  structures upon agents' coordina- tion
                  behaviors. This paper presents an Extended
                  Hierarchi- cal Task Network (EHTN) to represent
                  precisely those struc- tural features that aect
                  coordination. Using this EHTN formalism, an extended
                  set of Generalized Partial Global Planning (GPGP)
                  coordination mechanisms has been de- veloped for
                  multi-agent coordination. Each coordination
                  mechanism is dened in terms of EHTN rewriting rules
                  and an associated set of pre-dened EHTN
                  behaviors. This set of GPGP coordination mechanisms
                  has been applied to a simulated emergency medical
                  service (EMS) system. The experimental results
                  reveal some of the performance rela- tionships
                  between specic mechanisms and external envi-
                  ronmental characteristics.},
  url = 	 {http://jmvidal.cse.sc.edu/library/chen06a.pdf},
  keywords = 	 {multiagent planning}
}