Argumentation for Coordinating Shared Activities

There is an increasing need for space missions to be able to collaboratively (and competitively) develop plans both within and across missions. In addition, interacting spacecraft that interleave onboard planning and execution must reach con- sensus on their commitments to each other prior to execution. In domains where missions have varying degrees of interac- tion and different constraints on communication and compu- tation, the missions will require different coordination proto- cols in order to efficiently reach consensus within their im- posed deadlines. We describe a Shared Activity Coordination (SHAC) framework that provides a decentralized algorithm for negotiating the scheduling of shared activities over the lifetimes of multiple agents and a foundation for customizing protocols for negotiating planner interactions. We investigate variations of a few simple protocols based on argumentation and distributed constraint satisfaction techniques and evalu- ate their abilities to reach consistent solutions according to computation, time, and communication costs in an abstract domain where spacecraft propose joint measurements.