The AAAI-02 Workshop "Planning with and for Multiagent Systems"

The AAAI-02 Workshop on

Planning with and for Multiagent Systems

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Schedule

Workshop Format

Important Dates

Submission Procedure

Organization

Workshop Description

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:

Formalizations of the Multi-Agent Planning Problem
Description languages for MAP
Distributed planning algorithms
Centralized planning algorithms for concurrent MA domains
Distributed plan execution
Distributed scheduling
Communication in MAP
Privacy issues in MAP
Deliberative vs. reactive planning in (highly dynamic) MAS
MAP applications: systems and domains
Evaluation, benchmark problems, standards

Workshop format

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.
Possible topics for panel or open discussions will soon be listed here. Further suggestions (speakers to invite, discussion themes etc.) are welcome and should be sent to Michael Brenner.

Important Dates

Submission deadline: March 15, 2002

Notification of acceptance: April 19, 2002

Camera-ready copy deadline: May 3, 2002

Workshop: July 28/29, 2002

Submission Procedure

The workshop 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 until March 15, 2002. Submitted research papers should be in PostScript or PDF format and use the AAAI formatting style (available at http://www.aaai.org/Publications/Author/macros-link.html).

Organization / Contact Information

Michael Brenner (co-chair) Institut für Informatik Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg Georges-Koehler-Allee, Geb. 52 D-79110 Freiburg Germany Email: brenner@informatik.uni-freiburg.de WWW: http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~brenner Phone: +49 (761) 230-8226 Fax: +1 (761) 230-8222	Marie desJardins (co-chair) University of Maryland, Baltimore County Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering 1000 Hilltop Circle Baltimore, MD 21250 USA Email: mariedj@cs.umbc.edu WWW: http://www.cs.umbc.edu/~mariedj/ Phone: +1 (410) 455-3967 Fax: +1 (410) 455-3969
Jörg Denzinger Department of Computer Science University of Calgary 2500 University Drive NW Calgary, Alberta Canada T2N 1N4 Email: denzinge@cpsc.ucalgary.ca WWW: http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~denzinge/ Phone: +1 (403) 220 5574 Fax: +1 (403) 284 4707	Edmund Durfee EECS Department University of Michigan 1101 Beal Avenue Ann Arbor MI 48109-2110 USA Email: durfee@umich.edu WWW: http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/durfee/ Phone: +1 (734) 936-1563 Fax: +1 (734) 763-1260
Subbarao Kambhampati Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering Arizona State University Tempe, AZ 85287-5406 USA Email: rao@asu.edu WWW: http://rakaposhi.eas.asu.edu/rao.html Phone: +1 (480) 965-0113 Fax: +1 (480) 965-2751	Marius Silaghi Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne CH-1015 Ecublens Switzerland Email: Marius.Silaghi@epfl.ch WWW: http://liawww.epfl.ch/~silaghi/ Phone: +41-(0)21-693-6679

Last modified: Feb 20, 2002 by Michael Brenner

Submission deadline:	March 15, 2002
Notification of acceptance:	April 19, 2002
Camera-ready copy deadline:	May 3, 2002
Workshop:	July 28/29, 2002