CfP Special issue in Multiagent and Grid Systems: Coordinating Agents' Plans and Schedules

[Mathijs de Weerdt]

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                Call for Papers
    Special Issue of Multiagent and Grid Systems
 on Coordinating Agents' Plans and Schedules (CAPS)

URL: http://www.st.ewi.tudelft.nl/~mathijs/mags08/

Guest editors: Brad Clement, Mathijs de Weerdt

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Multiagent planning is concerned with planning by (and
for) multiple agents. Nowadays a major issue in
multiagent planning is the coordination of single-agent
planners. Here, coordination is studied not only during
the execution of plans, but also in the (pre)-planning
phase.

A wide range of real applications could benefit from
such coordinated planning technology, for example, in
transportation and logistics, health care management,
space missions, military tasks, and disaster
management. Also, planning in the context of
human-computer (or human-robot) interaction is
inherently a multiagent planning task. Coordinating the
plans of the involved entities up front has the
potential to improve the efficiency of the whole
system. However, currently, a great amount of research
seems to focus solely on either planning, or the
coordination of agents without the context of a plan.

The purpose of this special issue is to bring together
advanced work that addresses the problems that arise
when coordinating the plans and schedules of multiple
agents. We therefore solicit papers with original work,
as well as surveys that relate to one or more of the
following questions:

1. Which applications require decentralized planning?

  (a) Can we derive benchmark problems from these applications?

2. How can we evaluate multiagent planning techniques?

  (a) How to measure communication costs, privacy loss,
    flexibility and robustness?

  (b) How to measure plan quality when agents are
    self-interested (e.g., multi-objective
    optimization, or game theoretical concepts such as
    Pareto optimal solutions)?

3. What are efficient techniques to deal with the many
  problems inherent to a dynamic and uncertain
  multiagent world?

  (a) How to deal with local autonomy, privacy issues,
    and conflicting preferences?

  (b) How to deal with uncertainty and incomplete information?

  (c) How to coordinate multiagent plan diagnosis and
    (local) plan repair?

  (d) How to coordinate plans when agents' objectives
    (tasks, intentions, preferences,...) evolve over
    time?

Submissions should clarify their relevance to these questions.

To summarize, specific topics of interest include (but
are not limited to):

* multiagent planning and scheduling applications

* strategies for testing/evaluating distributed
  plan/schedule management techniques

* self-interested planning agents

* privacy in distributed planning

* game theoretic planning

* managing local autonomy in team planning/scheduling

* mixed initiative and adjustable autonomy in
  distributed planning/scheduling

* negotiation over tasks/intentions in distributed
  planning/scheduling

* distributed continual planning/scheduling

* plan/schedule maintenance in single and multiagent systems

* plan/schedule repair in stochastic and adversarial domains

* active (distributed) monitoring to trigger
  plan/schedule maintenance

* distributed planning under uncertainty
* multiagent planning with sparse or unreliable
  communication


IMPORTANT DATES

* Deadline for submissions: November 18, 2007

* Notifications: February 2008

* Deadline for revisions: Spring 2008

* Publication: Begin 2009


Please contact the guest editors with any queries:

* Brad Clement, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena
* Mathijs de Weerdt, Delft University of Technology