Anticipation based on constraint processing in a multi-agent context

Anticipation is a general concept used and applied in various domains. Many studies in the field of artificial intelligence have investigated the capacity for anticipation. In this article, we focus on the use of anticipation in multi-agent coordination, particularly preventive anticipation which consists of anticipating undesirable future situations in order to avoid them. We propose to use constraint processing to formalize preventive anticipation in the context of multi-agent coordination. The resulting algorithm allows any action that may induce an undesirable future state to be detected upstream of any multi-agent coordination process. Our proposed method is instantiated in a road traffic simulation tool. For the specific question of simulating traffic at road junctions, our results show that taking anticipation into account allows globally realistic behaviors to be reproduced without provoking gridlock between the simulated vehicles.