Contingency constrained operations

Abstract: "This paper develops a new approach to an old and difficult problem: how to make and update plans for correcting a given set of contingencies. The approach is to decompose the problem into a set of loosely coupled, much smaller problems that can be solved by a team of cooperating agents. The team is expandable and its agents are autonomous, work in parallel, and communicate asynchronously. Most of the current cadre of agents use algorithms that are either well-known or fairly obvious. One type, however, uses a new algorithm for finding starting points for nonlinear programming codes. This algorithm is described and the performance of the team illustrated with small examples."