The essence of planning lies in deciding a course of actions for achieving the desired goals. This project extends planning paradigm to a distributed environment with real-time requirements. In distributed planning, multiple nodes must take independent decisions to achieve a common goal with possibly conflicting and partial information about the global state. Distributed planning paradigm would be useful for applications like air traffic control and distributed defense systems which must deal with a dynamic situation in real-time with each node having its own view of the global state. The planning is carried out in two steps: (1) generation of plan specifications from goals and (2) derivation of executable code from plan specifications. A collection of cooperating experts use a cooperation policy, such as contract net to generate plan specifications. The cooperation policy is implemented by a cooperation mechanism. We propose to extend the network event manager, a rule driven program, for providing the cooperation mechanism. Derivation of executable code from plan specifications will be done through extension of Berkeley Specification System.
