A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Engineering in Computer Science, School of Engineering and Technology

Thesis (M.Eng.) - Asian Institute of Technology, 2012

Planning is one of the critical components in human being{u2019}s decision making processes. It isa reasoning paradigm where people have to choose and organize actions to satisfy their ex-pected outcomes. In the field of Artificial Intelligence, Automated Planning and Schedulinghas become an immense research.Collaborative planning is one of the important planning problems as working together throughthe act of making choices is fundamental for human nature. This fact is reflected in an emer-gence of collaborative tools for people{u2019}s participation. Such tools include social networkingsites, instant messengers, email and mailing list, and so on. Unfortunately, these collaborat-ing tools are still functioned based on the notion of human creativity involvement without anautomatic planning system.This thesis presented the framework to represent collaborative planning problems using HTNformalism, determine the plans, and evaluate the most preferred plan. Three main compo-nents are HTN planner(s), Plans validator, and Plan selector. The thesis also provided themethodology to solve the problems under the assumption that planning knowledge is decen-tralized. This is described in terms of communication protocols for decentralized cooperativeagents. A practical example was implemented through the use of answer set programmingand SimJava.