Cooperative planning using multiple agents

I haven't seen many comments on the blog for awhile, so here's something for discussion.

The topic of cooperative planning between multiple agents came up in another class I attend. No one in that class had heard of much research on this front. The questions are, what could be done, what has been done, and what interesting problems are there in this field?

I suggested at the time that if each agent was an executioner of the plan then these agents could be viewed as resources, and one among them could act as a scheduler assigning parts of the plan to each agent. The plan would be divied up and each agent given a sub plan that when all executed together would complete the larger plan. This is sort of cheating though because all of the planning is then being done by one agent, its just the doing that is cooperated. This was really all that I knew of that had been done in planning that could contribute to this topic.

The next bit was applying game theory. Do the agents assume the other agents are cooporative? How is a goal established? How does each agent plan around the possibility that other agents do not complete their part? How much communication and sensing do each of these agents have during planning and execution? In the case of non perfect communication could these agents adapt to unexpected problems during execution and adjust the plan?

If you know of successful research along this topic post a link to it. Otherwise feel free to post thoughts on any part of this.