Token-based Execution Semantics for Multi-Agent Epistemic Planning

Epistemic planning has been employed as a means to achieve implicit coordination in cooperative multi-agent systems where world knowledge is distributed between the agents, and agents plan and act individually. However, recent work has shown that even if all agents act with respect to plans that they consider optimal from their own subjective perspective, infinite executions can occur. In this paper, we analyze the idea of using a single token that can be passed around between the agents and which is used as a prerequisite for acting. We show that introducing such a token to any planning task will prevent the existence of infinite executions. We furthermore analyze the conditions under which solutions to a planning task are preserved under our tokenization.