Multi-agent planning and assignment in AgentPlat

A plan is a retained description of intended work

The planning and assignment reference describes plans as immutable or versioned artifacts containing work, constraints, roles and admissible transitions. A plan can be rejected or superseded without causing its proposed effects.

This is useful when a mission has several possible approaches. Preserve the selected plan and the reason for changing it so an operator can compare intended work with the actual execution, rather than reconstructing the plan from tool calls.

Assignment answers who is eligible now

An assignment binds a role to an eligible agent under current membership and policy. Treat it as expiring operational state, not a permanent association between a role name and a machine.

In an illustrative research mission, a specialist may be capable of a task but temporarily ineligible because its membership or other required context is stale. Capability is an input to selection; it does not settle every condition necessary for an active assignment.

Reassignment needs a cause and fresh evidence

The documentation requires fresh eligibility checks and a causal connection to the original expiry or failure. A timeout should therefore lead to a recorded recovery decision, not an unrelated new task with a new identity.

The recovery loop stops or fences invalid work before re-evaluating peers and roles. A replacement should not compete indefinitely with the predecessor under two apparently current assignments.

Keep the external action boundary downstream

A valid assignment identifies who may undertake the scoped work. An external action may still require current policy, approval, expiry and idempotency checks. The protected-action reference locates those concerns at execution.

For example, selecting an agent to prepare a supplier comparison does not automatically let it place an order. An application should represent those as different operations even if the same agent and plan mention both.

Separate collective plans from Room plans

Room progressive plans materialize collaboration steps such as contributions and Handoffs. Collective planning focuses on mission work, roles and assignment. They are related concepts with different documented surfaces.

• Identify which component owns the plan you are inspecting.
• Retain its version and predecessor.
• Inspect current assignment separately from intended role.
• Exercise expiry and verify fresh eligibility on replacement.
• Test protected effects independently from assignment success.

A report that says only “the planner selected an agent” leaves the operational questions unanswered. Show the retained work and permission boundaries that made the execution valid.