Second International Workshop on:

Optimisation in Multi-Agent Systems

(OptMas)

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

Budapest, Hungary
(AAMAS 2009)
11 May 2009

 

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: Professor Milind Tambe

Speaker Bio: Milind Tambe is a Professor of Computer Science at University of Southern California(USC). He received his Ph.D. from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He leads the TEAMCORE Research Group at USC, with research interests in multi-agent systems, specifically multi-agent and agent-human teamwork. He is a fellow of AAAI (Association for Advancement of Artificial Intelligence) and recipient of several awards including ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) SIGART Agents Research award.

Programme

9:30 - 10:30

1. James Atlas and Keith Decker. "Distributed Constraint Optimization for Time-Critical Domains"

2. Lachlan Dufton and Kate Larson. "Multiagent Policy Teaching"

3. Sebastian Stein, Enrico Gerding, Alex Rogers, Kate Larson and Nicholas Jennings. "Flexible Procurement of Services with Uncertain Durations"

4. Sankalp Khanna, Abdul Sattar, David Hansen and Bela Stantic. "An Efficient Algorithm For Solving Dynamic Complex DCOP Problems"
11:00 - 12:30

5. Ioannis Vetsikas, Alex Rogers and Nick Jennings. "Pick-A-Bundle: A Novel Bundling Strategy for Selling Multiple Items within Online Auctions"

6. Pierre Monier, Sylvain Piechowiak and René Mandiau. "A complete algorithm for DisCSP: Distributed Backtracking with Sessions (DBS)"

7. David G.A. Mobach, Erwin J.W. Abbink, Pieter J. Fioole, Ramon M. Lentink, Leo G. Kroon, Eddy H.T. van der Heijden and Niek J.E. Wijngaards. "Train Driver Rescheduling using Task-Exchange Teams"

8. Tony Wauters, Katja Verbeeck and Greet Vanden Berghe. "A Multi-Agent Learning Approach for the Multi-Mode Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling Problem"
14:00 - 15:00
Invited Talk by Prof. Milind Tambe.
15:00-15:30

9. Zhengyu Yin, Christopher Kiekintveld, Atul Kumar and Milind Tambe. "Local Optimal Solutions for DCOP: New Criteria, Bound, and Algorithm"
16:00 - 17:00

10. Meritxell Vinyals, Juan Antonio Rodriguez Aguilar and Jesus Cerquides. "Generalizing DPOP: Action-GDL, a new complete algorithm for DCOPs"

11.Fernando dos Santos and Ana L. C. Bazzan. "eXtreme-Ants: Ant Based Algorithm for Task Allocation in Extreme Teams"

12. Nicolas Stefanovitch, Amal El-Fallah Seghrouchni and Frédéric Peschanski. "Towards Efficient Coordination in Open MAS using Graphical Utility Models"
17:00 - 17:30
Panel Session with Milind Tambe, Makoto Yokoo, Sven Koenig, and Alex Rogers

 

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 solution computed 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. General heuristics and approximate solutions to multi-agent optimisation problems.

Keywords

Topics include but are not limited to:

Important Dates:

 

11th MAY  2008 - Workshop takes place in conjunction with AAMAS 2009.

Organising Committee

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

Juan Antonio Rodriguez Aguilar (IIIA,CSIC, Spain)

Dr. Alex Rogers (University of Southampton, UK)

Dr. Alessandro Farinelli (University of Southampton, UK)

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

 

Programme Committee

Andrea Giovannucci, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain

Kate Larson, University of Waterloo, Canada

Rajiv Maheshwaran, University of Southern California, USA

Maria Polukarova, University of Southampton, UK

Talal Rahwan, University of Southampton, UK

Paul Scerri, Carnegie Mellon University, USA

Carles Sierra, IIIA, CSIC, Spain

Marius Silaghi, Florida Institute of Technology, USA

Sebastian Stein, University of Southampton, UK

Ioannis Vetsikas, University of Southampton, UK

Makoto Yokoo, Kyushu University, Japan

Onn Shehory, IBM, Israel

Robin Glinton, Carnegie Mellon University, USA

Adrian Petcu, SAP Research, Zurich

Nathan Schurr, Aptima Inc. , USA

Ulle Endriss, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands

Sven Koenig, University of Southern California, USA

Andrea Roli, University of Bologna, Italy

Christian Blum, Technical University of Catalonia, Spain

Jesús Cerquides, University of Barcelona

Rica Gonen, Yahoo Inc.