Abstract
At the request of the authors, with the agreement of the Journal Topic Editor and SAGE Publishing, the following article has been retracted.
Li P, Yang S and Wang S. A decentralized multi-agent control approach for robust robot plan execution, International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems, 2018; 15(2). DOI: 10.1177/1729881418769000
The corresponding author alerted SAGE to errors in the article with regard to Table 2 on page 11, which presents the comparison results between the multi-agent approach and two traditional approaches. In the initial experiments, errors in module design and programming resulted in inefficiencies in the programs written with object-oriented and component-based approaches, which introduce significant bias in the time cost and code amounts and therefore compromises the findings.
The corresponding author offered the explanation that after the case study was repeated by proficient robot engineers, it was established that both object and component models can abstract the robot program well. The comparison criterions of time costs and program amount cannot clearly distinguish which control approach is better. As the evaluation of such criterions is biased and subjective, the presented results lose their confidence. The authors intend to conduct further experimentation to more objectively evaluate the comparative performances of their proposed control approach.
In addition to the aforementioned experimental errors, the corresponding author informed SAGE that some findings were included in the article without acknowledgement of a co-researcher.