First International Workshop on:

Agent Technology for Disaster Management

(ATDM)

The workshop successfully took place on the 8th of May 2006 in Hakodate, Japan in conjunction with the Fifth International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-agent Systems. The proceedings as well as most of the presentations given at the workshop can be accessed from the links below.

Proceedings of the workshop are available here (8MB): ATDM Papers

Description

In the light of recent events throughout the world, ranging from natural disasters such as the Asian Tsunami and hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, to the man-made disasters such as the London terrorist attacks, the topic of disaster management (also known as emergency response) become a key concern and there is now an overwhelming need for  better information technology to help support their efficient and effective management.

Disaster management requires that a number of actors, each with their own aims, objectives, and resources, be able to coordinate their efforts in a number of ways to prevent or manage the aftermath of a disaster. The techniques involved may involve both centralized and decentralized coordination mechanisms that need to operate in environments prone to uncertainty given the dynamic nature of disasters. More specifically, the technical issues that agent-based technologies can deal with include:

• Machine learning algorithms that are efficient and effective in dynamic, multi-actor environments that are uncertain and incomplete.

• Coordination mechanisms that ensure desirable overall properties emerge based on local actions and views.

• Coordination mechanisms that enable collectives to plan and act collaboratively in order to achieve common goals.

• Techniques that enable an actor to effectively balance acting and information gathering in dynamic, uncertain, multi-actor environments.

• Methods for modelling and predicting the system behaviour that will ensue from specifications of the local behaviour of the individual actors.

• Techniques that enable an actor to fuse, in a decentralised manner, inter-related information that is uncertain, incomplete, imprecise and ambiguous.

• Decentralised system architectures that can operate effectively in uncertain and dynamic environments and that are robust, scaleable and flexible in their operation.

Against this background, this workshop invites works from different strands of the multi-agent systems community that pertain to technologies that can be applied in disaster management scenarios. In so doing, this workshop aims to provide a forum for the discussion of issues arising in designing, implementing, or simulating agent-based disaster management systems. 

Keywords

Papers should target applications of agent-based technology to the area of disaster management. Also, position statements from ongoing projects concerned with the application of information technology to disaster management are also welcome. There are plans to invite authors of selected best papers to resubmit in a special issue of a relevant journal (more details will be posted soon). Relevant topics include but are not limited to the following:

1. Teamwork, Coordination, and Planning Mechanisms in dynamic and uncertain environments.
2. Decentralised agent-based architectures.
3. Mechanism Design.
4. Market Mechanisms.
5. Multi-agent learning.
6. Decision making under uncertainty.
7. Autonomous robots and robot teams.
8. Agent-based simulation
9. Distributed constraint optimisation.

Submission Instructions

Papers should be formatted using the ACM conference style file and should be in pdf format. All submissions must be emailed to sdr AT ecs dot soton dot ac dot uk. 

Paper lengths: Position statements should not be more than 2 pages and Full papers should not be more than 8 pages.

Important Dates:

Paper review process  

Papers were reviewed by 2 PC members each.

Organising Committee

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

Prof. Milind Tambe (University of Southern California, USA)

Prof. Toru Ishida (Kyoto University, Japan)

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

Programme Committee

Prof. Austin Tate (AIAI, University of Edinburgh, UK)

Dr. Alessandro Farinelli (Università di Roma ''La Sapienza', Italy)

Dr. Frank Fiedrich (George Washington University, USA)

Dr. Alex Rogers (University of Southampton, UK)

Prof. H. Levent Akin (Bogaziçi University, Turkey)

Prof. Hitoshi Matsubara (Future University, Japan)

Dr. Itsuki Noda (AIST, Ibaraki, Japan)

Dr. Jeff Bradshaw (IHMC, USA)

Dr. Lin Padgham (RMIT, Australia)

Dr. Partha Dutta (University of Southampton)

Dr. Paul Scerri (Robotics Institute, CMU, USA)

Dr. Ranjit Nair (Honeywell, USA)

Dr. Stephen Hailes (University College London, UK)

Prof. Victor Lesser (University of Massachusetts, USA)

Prof. Tomoichi Takahashi (Meijo University, Japan)