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The call for paper is also available as a PDF or ASCII text file.
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| Description |
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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.
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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.
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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:
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Which applications require decentralized planning?
(a) Can we derive benchmark problems from these applications?
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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)?
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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?
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Submissions should clarify their relevance to these questions.
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| Topics |
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To summarize, specific topics of interest include (but
are not limited to):
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multiagent planning and scheduling applications
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strategies for testing/evaluating distributed
plan/schedule management techniques
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self-interested planning agents
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privacy in distributed planning
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game theoretic planning
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managing local autonomy in team planning/scheduling
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mixed initiative and adjustable autonomy in
distributed planning/scheduling
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negotiation over tasks/intentions in distributed
planning/scheduling
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distributed continual planning/scheduling
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plan/schedule maintenance in single and multiagent systems
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plan/schedule repair in stochastic and adversarial domains
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active (distributed) monitoring to trigger
plan/schedule maintenance
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distributed planning under uncertainty
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multiagent planning with sparse or unreliable
communication
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| Important dates |
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Deadline for submissions: November 18 December 18, 2007
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Notifications: April 2008
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Deadline for revisions: end of May / early June 2008
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Planned publication: Begin 2009
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| Guest editors |
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Please contact the guest editors with any queries:
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Brad Clement, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena
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Mathijs de Weerdt, Delft University of Technology
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Call for papers
