To be held in conjunction with the *Eleventh International Conference on Autonomous and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS 2012)*
4 or 5 June 2012
cfp at:
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Call
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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
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to be announced
(Previous invited speakers include Moshe Tennenholtz (2008), Milind Tambe (2009), Paul Scerri (2010), Sven Koenig (2011) ).
Background
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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 algorithms 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 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. Techniques to manage and disseminate relevant information across different agents.
4. Dealing with privacy concerns: solving complex optimization problems while leaking as little private information as possible
5. Problems that require anytime algorithms.
6. Approximate algorithms that need to provide guarantees on the quality of the solution.
7. Mechanisms whose properties can be significantly affected if the solution computed is not the optimal one.
8. Techniques to deal with optimizations that have to be repeated with possibly only slight changes in the input data.
9. 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.
10. 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.
Keywords
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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
Workshop motivation
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OPTMAS complements the objectives of the AAMAS conference by providing a forum for multi-agent algorithm designers. The workshop will be attractive to those working in the general areas of distributed optimization, auction design, coordination, learning, and uncertainty and will be a good place to present original work and discuss acceptable benchmarks and evaluation methods for generally researched optimization problems.
The aim of OPTMAS is to complement the theoretical angle taken by work presented in the main conference, and other workshops, by focusing on the implementation issues and the general trends in optimization problems that arise across a variety of multi-agent applications.
Important dates
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* 28th FEBRUARY, 2012 - Submission of contributions to workshops
* 27th MARCH, 2012 - Workshop paper acceptance notification
* 4th or 5th JUNE, 2012 - Workshop takes place in conjunction with AAMAS 2012.
Submission
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Submissions should conform to the ACM SIG style (follow the formatting instructions
Authors can submit their papers through the OPTMAS 2012 Easychair submission site:
https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=optmas2012
Reviewing process
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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
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Best papers from OPTMAS 2008 and OPTMAS 2009 were selected for publication in the
special issue on Optimisation in Multi-Agent System of the Journal of Autonomous and Multiagent Systems (http://www.springerlink.com/content/n7p264t41264
We plan to continue this initiative for the 2010, 2011, 2012 edition. Therefore, we will negotiate the publication of selected, best papers in a quality journal (JAAMAS
Organizing committee
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Dr. Jesus Cerquides Bueno, IIIA - CSIC, Spain
Dr. Alessandro Farinelli, University of Verona, Italy
Dr. Sarvapali D. Ramchurn University of Southampton, UK
Dr. Juan Antonio Rodriguez-Aguilar,IIIA - CSIC, Spain
Dr. Meritxell Vinyals, University of Verona, Italy
Programme Committee
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Mohsen Afsharchi University of Zanjan
Ana L. C. Bazzan Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul
Christian Blum Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya
Archie Chapman University of Sydney
Francesco M. Fave University of Southampton
Katsutoshi Hirayama Kobe University
Christopher Krenkintveld University of Texas
Sven Koenig University of Southern California
Nikos Komodakis University of Crete
Akshat Kumar University of Massachusetts
Robert N. Lass Drexel University
Victor Lesser University of Massachusetts
Beatriz López University of Girona
Pedro Meseguer IIIA-CSIC
Maria Polukarov University of Southampton
Marc Pujol IIIA-CSIC
Talal Rahwan University of Southampton
Norman Salazar IIIA-CSIC
Onn Shehory IBM Haifa Research Lab
Eric Shieh University of Southern California
Sameer Singh University of Massachusetts
Ruben Stranders University of Southampton
Greet Vanden Berghe KaHo Sint-Lieven
William Yeoh Singapore Management University
Roie Zivan Ben Gurion University of the Negev
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