Call for Papers
Special Issue on Coordinating Agents' 
Plans and Schedules (CAPS)

Multiagent and Grid Systems, an International Journal

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

 Description

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 

 Paper submissions

[instructions forthcoming]

 Important dates

* Deadline for submissions: November 18, 2007

* Notifications: February 2008

* Deadline for revisions: Spring 2008

* Publication: Begin 2009

 Guest editors

Please contact the guest editors with any queries:

* Brad Clement, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena

* Mathijs de Weerdt, Delft University of Technology