CFP: Third International Workshop on Optimisation in Multi-Agent Systems (OPTMAS III)

[Juan Antonio Rodriguez]

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                 CFP: Third International Workshop on

            Optimisation in Multi-Agent Systems (OPTMAS III)
            ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

                      To be held in conjunction with the

     Ninth International Conference on Autonomous and Multi-Agent Systems
                             (AAMAS 2010)
                           10 or 11 May 2010
                 cfp at: http://www.optmas2010.com

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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
------------

Dr. Paul Scerri.
Short Bio: Paul Scerri is a Senior Systems Scientist at Carnegie Mellon
University's Robotics Institute. He received his PhD from Linköping
University. He has been specifially interested in building and coordinating
big teams (of hundreds or thousands) of agents to do various different
tasks. He has been involved in the development of Machinetta, a software
package that has been effectively used in a number of domains to coordinate
large teams.


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
-------------------

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

Sven Koenig - University of Southern California, USA

Nikos Komodakis, University of Crete, Greece

Kate Larson, University of Waterloo, Canada

Pedro Meseguer, IIIA-CSIC, Spain

Tomasz Michalak, University of Southampton, UK

Maria Polukarova, University of Southampton, UK

Talal Rahwan, University of Southampton, UK

Paul Scerri, Carnegie Mellon University, USA

Nathan Schurr, Aptima Inc., USA

Onn Shehory, IBM, Israel

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

Greet Vanden Berghe, KaHo St.-Lieven, Belgium