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CFP: Third International Workshop on
Optimisation in Multi-Agent Systems (OPTMAS III)
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To be held in conjunction with the
Ninnth International Conference on Autonomous and Multi-Agent Systems
(AAMAS 2010)
10 or 11 May 2010
cfp at: http://www.iiia.csic.es/~jar/optmas2010/
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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.
Note: The authors of the best papers selected from Optmas 2010 will be
invited to submit to a special issue of a quality journal (see below).
Invited Talk
------------
to be announced
(Previous invited speakers include Moshe Tennenholtz (2008) and Milind
Tambe (2009))
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. 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:
* Distributed Constraints Optimisation/Satisfaction
* Winner Determination Algorithms in Auctions
* Coalition Formation Algorithms
* Algorithms to compute Nash Equilibrium in games
* Optimisation under uncertainty
* Optimisation with incomplete or dynamic input data
* Algorithms for real-time applications
Important dates
---------------
* FEBRUARY, 2, 2010 - Submission of contributions to workshops
* MARCH 2, 2010 - Workshop paper acceptance notification
* MAY 10 or 11, 2010 - Workshop takes place in conjunction with AAMAS 2010.
Submission
----------
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
Reviewing process
-----------------
Papers will be reviewed by at least 2 reviewers. Criteria for selection
of papers will include: originality, readability, relevance to themes,
soundness, and overall quality.
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.
Organizing 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 A. Rodriguez Aguilar (IIIA,CSIC, Spain)
Dr. Alex Rogers (University of Southampton, UK)
Programme Committee (more to be added)
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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
Andrea Giovannucci, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain
Pedro Meseguer, IIIA-CSIC, Spain
Tomasz Michalak, University of Southampton, UK
Maria Polukarova, University of Southampton, UK
Talal Rahwan, University of Southampton, UK
Nathan Schurr, Aptima Inc., USA
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
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