AAAI 2004 Workshop on
Forming and Maintaining
Coalitions in Adaptive Multiagent Systems
Call for Participants
Deadline: March 12, 2004
This workshop will focus on the issues of coalitions in dynamic
multi-agent systems: specifically, on issues surrounding the formation of
coalitions among possibly self-interested individuals, and on how coalitions
adapt to change in dynamic settings through the choices of individual members.
Traditionally, an agent with complete information can rationalize
to form optimal coalitions with its neighbors for problem solving. However, in a noisy and dynamic environment
where events occur rapidly, information cannot be relayed among the agents
frequently enough, centralized updates and polling are expensive, and the
supporting infrastructure may partially fail, agents will be forced to form
sub-optimal coalitions. Similarly, in
such environments, changes in environmental dynamics may invalidate some of the
reasons for the original existence of a coalition. In this case, individual agents may influence the objectives of
coalition, encourage new members and reject others, and the coalition as a
whole adapts as a larger organism. In
such settings, agents need to reason, with the primary objective of forming a
successful coalition rather than an optimal one, and in influencing the
coalition (or forming new coalitions) to suit its changing needs. This includes reasoning about task
allocation, the needs of self and others, information exchange, uncertainty and
information incompleteness, coalition formation strategies, learning of better
formation strategies, and others.
Some of the questions to be considered are:
·
What
mechanisms are appropriate for forming long-term coalitions in distributed
systems, such as P2P?
·
What types
(or extent) of representation, including modeling of others, is necessary in
satisfactory coalition formation and maintenance? How parsimonious can representation be?
·
How can an
agent balance staying with a coalition that is less than perfectly effective as
opposed to forming new coalitions in the face of change?
·
What kind of
effects can an individual agent have on the focus or purpose of a coalition in
an adaptive system?
·
What about
the effects of trust, ability, and deception in heterogeneous systems under these
conditions?
·
How do
issues of agent authority assist in forming coalitions and allowing them to
adapt over time?
·
When agents
leave a coalition, how does the vacancy in the role the agent played change the
coalition? Can tasks be reallocated, membership criteria change, or other value
added to the coalition to supplement this vacancy? Is this done through
authority/committee or individual influence?
·
How can
agents distribute tasks, resources, costs, and profits among the coalition to
be able to persuade other agents to join the coalition in the first place, and
the reward the agents after the coalition is completed?
·
Which agent
should be responsible for manipulating a coalition to make it reachable and
reliable for its members in a dynamic environment?
·
How to name
or label a coalition to distinguish it from other coalitions?
·
How can
interesting solutions to the above questions be developed and deployed in real
systems?
Attendance
Participants
with paper accepted will automatically be invited to the workshop. Researchers who are interested in the
workshop will be invited by the committee.
Interested researchers are encouraged to e-mail the workshop chair.
Format of
Workshop
The
tentative format for the workshop consists of two general sessions. Each session will include 7-8 presentations
(about 20 minutes each) and a one-hour discussion.
Submission Requirements
Potential
participants should submit either an extended abstract (up to 3 pages) or an
original technical paper (up to 10 pages) including keywords and authors’
complete addresses. Submit electronically (in PS or PDF format) to
lksoh@cse.unl.edu.
Workshop
Chair
Leen-Kiat
Soh
Computer
Science and Engineering
University
of Nebraska
115 Ferguson
Hall
Lincoln, NE
68588-0115
e-mail:
lksoh@cse.unl.edu
tel:(402)
472-6738
fax:(402)
472-7767
Workshop Committee:
Leen-Kiat Soh (chair), University of Nebraska, lksoh@cse.unl.edu
John E. Anderson
(co-chair), University of Manitoba, andersj@cs.umanitoba.ca
Costas Tsatsoulis, University of Kansas, tsatsoul@ittc.ku.edu
Julita Vassileva, University of Saskatchewan, jiv@cs.usask.ca
Babak Esfandiari, Carleton University, babak@sce.carleton.ca
Workshop URL
www.cse.unl.edu/~lksoh/coalition.html