Abstract communication for coordinated planning

work offers evidence that distributed planning agents can greatly reduce communication costs by reasoning at abstract levels. While it is intuitive that improved search can reduce communication in such cases, there are other decisions about how to communicate plan information that greatly affect communication costs. This paper identifies cases independent of search where communicating at multiple levels of abstraction can exponentially decrease costs and where it can exponentially add costs. We conclude with a process for determining appropriate levels of communication based on characteristics of the domain.