Outsourcing

In Multi-Agent Planning complex plans are built upon the general idea of communication, coordination and composition or, in more general terms, interaction. If agents need goals that cannot directly obtain by their own, those goals will be indirectly obtained by contacting other agents that can guarantee them. This can be seen as a delegation of responsibility in the generation of the plan, or like a kind of outsourcing planning where an agent contracts a service (supplied by one or many other agents) to get a goal. This requires to determine the participants, who will exchange what services with whom, and the terms of the exchanges.

In more general terms, outsourcing refers to the contracting out of an internal business process to third-party agents, where agents may represent people, organisations and/or information systems. Outsourcing applies because it helps cut down the costs of operation or to subcontract complementary skills. This is the underlying principle in outsourcing planning: solving a problem goal that requires the cooperation of complementary agents to find the most appropriate agent and solution (plan) for each individual agents' subgoal, such that the combination of all solutions results in an efficient and satisfactory solution. We model the interaction between several outsourcing agents who share their intended plan to attend a client's request. Each plan has an individual utility, so all (possibly competitors) complementary agents need to collaborate effectively as a team to serve the petition such that the final plan is not only a Nash equilibrium but also leads to a global utility-optimal strategy.