Technological advancements have led to the development of few commercially available tele-surgery systems till date. However such systems are very expensive. In tele-surgery, the task of a surgeon (the activities related to a surgery) is partially executed by a robot. Typically, the robot is under the control of a surgeon; it executes the instructions of the controlling surgeon. In this paper we give formal model of a tele-surgery domain (heart surgery) as a multiagent planning problem. The actions related to the surgery are represented as planning operators. The model consists of two interactive agents, referred to as EXPERT and INTERN. The EXPERT controls the activities of the INTERN. The INTERN executes the actions suggested by the EXPERT. The state space of each agent is modeled as a transition system. The communication of the agents is modeled using CCS. We have defined a condition to establish the success of the surgery using notions of finite games. We have also developed a prototype implementation incorporating the above features.

Agent-based technology has generated a lot of attention in recent years because of its promise as a new paradigm for conceptualizing, designing, and implementing software systems. Some problems in real world cannot be handled by a single agent. Multiple agents work together to accomplish some task. Although multi-agent systems (MASs) provide many potential advantages, they also present many difficult challenges. This paper illustrates the importance of communication for planning in a multi-agent setting by considering a grid world domain that consists of obstacles at different locations. This paper provides a theoretical framework that is validated by the experimental results. Performance analysis with respect to plan size and execution time is also reported.