Third International Workshop on:

Optimisation in Multi-Agent Systems

(OptMas)

To be held in conjunction with the
Ninth Joint Conference on Autonomous and Multi-Agent Systems

Toronto, Canada
(AAMAS 2010)
10 May 2010

 

Call

This workshop invites works from different strands of the multi-agent systems community that pertain to the design of algorithms, models, and techniques to deal with multi-agent optimisation problems. In so doing, this workshop aims to provide a forum for researchers to discuss common issues that arise in solving optimisation problems in different areas and elaborate common benchmarks to test their solutions.

Invited Talk: Dr. Paul Scerri.

Short Bio: Paul Scerri is a Senior Systems Scientist at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute. He received his PhD from Linköping University. He has been specifially interested in building and coordinating big teams (of hundreds or thousands) of agents to do various different tasks. He has been involved in the development of Machinetta, a software package that has been effectively used in a number of domains to coordinate large teams.

Programme

8.50 Opening

9:00-10:00

1. Manish Jain, Erim Kardes, Christopher Kiekintveld, Fernando Ordonez and Milind Tambe. Optimal defender allocation for massive security games: A branch and price approach

2. Jason Tsai, Zhengyu Yin, Jun-young Kwak, David Kempe, Christopher Kiekintveld and Milind Tambe. Game-Theoretic Allocation of Security Forces in a City

10:00-10:30 Coffee break

10:30-12:00

3. James Pita, Milind Tambe, Chris Kiekintveld and Michael Scott. Security Allocations with Imperfect Information

4. Kathryn Macarthur, Alessandro Farinelli, Sarvapali Ramchurn and Nicholas Jennings. Efficient, Superstabilizing Decentralised Optimisation for Dynamic Task Allocation Environments

5. Meritxell Vinyals, Juan Rodriguez-Aguilar and Jesus Cerquides. Divide-and-Coordinate by Egalitarian Utilities: turning DCOPs into egalitarian worlds

12:00-13:30 Lunch 

13:30-14:30
 
Invited talk by Dr. Paul Scerri
 
14:30-15:00
 
6. Martí Navarro, Vicente Botti and Vicente Julián. Real-Time agent reasoning: a temporal bounded CBR approach

15:00-15:30 Coffee break

15:30-16:30

7. Rajiv Maheswaran, Craig M Rogers, Romeo Sanchez and Pedro Szekely. Human-Agent Collaborative Optimization of Real-Time Distributed Dynamic Multi-Agent Coordination

8. Masahiro Ono and Brian Williams. Market-based Risk Allocation Optimization

16:30 - 17:30 Panel session. Confirmed panelists: Victor Lesser, Sven Koenig, Paul Scerri, Milind Tambe, David Parkes.

17.30 Closing

Proceedings

Donwload the OPTMAS 2010 proceedings here.

Background

The number of novel applications of multi-agent systems has followed an exponential trend over the last few years, ranging from online auction design, through in multi-sensor networks, to scheduling of tasks in multi-actor systems. Multi-agent systems designed for all these applications generally require some form of optimization in order to achieve their goal. Given this, a number of advancements have been made in the design of winner determination, coalition formation, and distributed constraints optimization algorithms among others. However, there are no general principles guiding the design of such algorithms that would enable researchers to either exploit solutions designed in other areas or to ensure that their algorithms conform to some level of applicability to real problems.

This workshop aims to address the above issues by bringing together researchers from different parts of the Multi-Agent Systems research area to present their work and discuss acceptable solutions, benchmarks, and evaluation methods for generally researched optimization problems.

In particular, the main issues to be addressed by the workshop will include (but are not limited to):

  1. Techniques to model and solve optimisation problems in which the actors are partly or completely distributed and can only communicate with their peers.
  2. Algorithms to compute solutions to mechanisms that deal with different stakeholders who may be self interested or may have different computation/communication capabilities from their peers.
  3. Dealing with privacy concerns: solving complex optimization problems while leaking as little private information as possible.
  4. Problems that require anytime algorithms.
  5. Algorithms that need to provide guarantees on the quality of the solution.
  6. Mechanisms whose properties can be significantly affected if the computed solution is not the optimal one.
  7. Techniques to deal with optimizations that have to be repeated with possibly only slight changes in the input data.
  8. Techniques to deal with situations where the input data may be uncertain or unreliable, requiring that the solution computed be robust to slight differences from the true values
  9. Techniques to deal with agents that are tied to physical devices. This involves computation and communication constraints that need to be considered in the coordination techniques, as well as the possibility of failures of the devices and communication links.
  10. Benchmarks for optimisation algorithms in dynamic environments.

Keywords

Topics include but are not limited to:

Important Dates:

MAY 10, 2010 - Workshop takes place in conjunction with AAMAS 2010.

 

Submission and review

Submissions should conform to the ACM SIG style (see http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates for more details) and 
should not be more than *8* pages long (excluding appendices).

Authors can submit their papers through the OPTMAS 20010 Easychair submission site: 

 
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=optmas2010

 

Each paper will be reviewed by at least 2 reviewers.

 

Publication

 

After OPTMAS 2009 the best papers were selected for publication in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Autonomous and Multiagent Systems. 
We plan to continue this initiative for the 2010 edition. Therefore, we will negotiate the publication of selected, best papers in a quality journal.

 

Organising Committee

Dr. Alessandro Farinelli (University of Verona, Italy)

Prof. Nicholas R. Jennings (University of Southampton, UK)

Dr. Sarvapali D. Ramchurn (University of Southampton, UK)

Dr. Juan Antonio Rodriguez Aguilar (IIIA,CSIC, Spain)

Dr. Alex Rogers (University of Southampton, UK)

 

Primary contact

Dr. Juan Antonio Rodriguez Aguilar (jar@iiia.csic.es)

 

Programme Committee (to be confirmed)

Anna Bazzan, Instituto de Informatica, UFGRS, Brazil

Christian Blum, Technical University of Catalonia, Spain

Ladislau Boloni, University of Central Florida, USA

Jesús Cerquides, University of Barcelona, Spain

Archie Chapman, University of Southampton, UK

Andrea Giovannucci, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain

Sven Koenig - University of Southern California, USA

Nikos Komodakis, University of Crete, Greece

Kate Larson, University of Waterloo, Canada

Beatriz López, University of Girona, Spain

Pedro Meseguer, IIIA-CSIC, Spain

Tomasz Michalak, University of Southampton, UK

Maria Polukarova, University of Southampton, UK

Talal Rahwan, University of Southampton, UK

Paul Scerri, Carnegie Mellon University, USA

Nathan Schurr, Aptima Inc., USA

Onn Shehory, IBM, Israel

Marius Silaghi, Florida Institute of Technology, USA

Nicolas Stefanovitch, University of Paris 6, France

Sebastian Stein, University of Southampton, UK

Meritxell Vinyals, IIIA-CSIC, Spain

Greet Vanden Berghe, KaHo St.-Lieven, Belgium

Makoto Yokoo, Kyushu University, Japan