CFP: Planning with and for Multi-agent Systems (AAAI 2002 Workshop)

[rao@cotopaxi.eas.asu.edu]

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                     CALL FOR PAPERS & PARTICIPATION

                          AAAI 2002 Workshop on

                PLANNING WITH AND FOR MULTIAGENT SYSTEMS

                   Edmonton, Canada, July 28/29, 2002

       http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~brenner/MAP-workshop/

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Multiagent Systems (MAS) have become an important sub-field of AI, and
several classical AI topics are now broadly studied in their MAS (i.e.
distributed) variants. Multiagent Planning (MAP) extends classical AI
Planning to domains where several agents can plan and act together.
Application areas of MAP include multi-robot environments, cooperating
Internet agents, logistics, manufacturing, military tasks etc.

While related MAS disciplines (e.g. Distributed Constraint Satisfaction)
have benefited from standardized problem specifications and benchmarks,
existing work on MAP is still very heterogeneous. Approaches differ for
example in their emphasis on either the distributed planning or the
distributed plan execution process, in the ways communication and
perception are used, and in whether a global plan for all agents or a
local plan for each agent is produced. Some of the underlying questions
have been recently addressed in related fields, such as in  extensions
of Classical Planning to concurrent plan models or in distributed
versions of heuristic search algorithms, but the diversity of MAP
approaches makes it difficult for MAP research as a whole to benefit
from these developments. 

Therefore, this workshop intends to bring together researchers working
on any form of Multiagent planning or in related fields to discuss their
common and differing goals and research methods, and to identify
potentials for collaboration and cross-fertilization. 


Topics include:

o Formalizations of the Multi-Agent Planning Problem

o Description languages for MAP

o Distributed planning algorithms

o Centralized planning algorithms for concurrent MA domains

o Distributed plan execution

o Distributed scheduling

o Communication in MAP

o Privacy issues in MAP

o Deliberative vs. reactive planning in (highly dynamic) MAS

o MAP applications: systems and domains

o Evaluation, benchmark problems, standards


Important Dates:

March 15, 2002		Submission deadline
April 19, 2002		Acceptance notification
May 3, 2002		Camera-ready papers due
July 28/29, 2002	Workshop


Workshop Format and Submission:

The 1.5-day workshop will include invited speakers, topically grouped
and moderated presentations of submitted papers, and above all,
extensive panel and open discussions on key topics of MAP and directions
for joint post-workshop efforts. It will be limited to 40-60 invited 
participants. Persons interested in attending should electronically
submit a short paper (up to 6 pages) or position statement (up to 2 
pages) to Michael Brenner (brenner@informatik.uni-freiburg.de) until 
March 15, 2002. Submitted research papers should be in PostScript or 
PDF format and use the AAAI style sheet.


Chairs:

Michael Brenner, Institut fuer Informatik, Albert-Ludwigs-Universitaet
Freiburg, Georges-Koehler-Allee Geb. 52, D-79110 Freiburg,
Germany. Email: brenner@informatik.uni-freiburg.de

Marie desJardins, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Department
of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, 1000 Hilltop Circle,
Baltimore, MD 21250, USA. Email: mariedj@cs.umbc.edu


Comittee:

Joerg Denzinger, University of Calgary; Edmund Durfee, University of
Michigan; Subbarao Kambhampati, Arizona State University; Marius
Silaghi, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne