ACC 2014 Workshop

ACC 2014 Workshop: Open Problems in Multi-Agent Systems

  • Organizers:
  • When: Tuesday June 3, 2014

  • Where: 3rd Floor Council/Forum Area

Please keep checking this website for updates.

Motivations and Rationale

Over the past two decades, we have witnessed an unprecedented growth in sensing, communications, computation, and robotic actuation, which can drastically change the way our society collects and processes information. The sensor network revolution has created the possibility of exploring and interacting with the environment in ways not possible before. The recent progress in robotics and actuation has further created the possibility of unmanned autonomous vehicles helping us achieve tasks that are otherwise hazardous or impossible. The growing importance of multi-agent cooperative systems has also been heavily acknowledged by the research community, and several work has appeared addressing different aspects of these systems. However, we are still quite far from fully understanding how to design a multi-agent system such that all the issues of sensing, communication, navigation, and resource/system constraints are addressed in a general framework that is as independent of a specific scenario as possible. We are not even close to fundamentally understanding how to design a multi-agent system in terms of the homogeneity and diversity of its team members. Furthermore, due to the multi-disciplinary nature of these systems, research has also been conducted in several different communities in parallel. For instance, in the area of distributed decision making, the control community has mainly focused on the theoretical foundations of consensus while the robotics community has developed algorithmic approaches to deal with the complexity of the problem. In the area of connectivity maintenance, the control community has focused on the graph theoretical approaches, while the networking community has addressed routing and multi-hop design issues on mobile systems. As such, after several years of extensive work in this area, it is the right time to pause and ask about the important problems that are still open and need to be solved to fundamentally move the field forward. This is the main goal of this proposed workshop. By bringing together experts that have extensively worked in different aspects of multi-agent systems, we hope to have a clear understanding of the road ahead in realizing the full vision of these systems. Note that the purpose of the workshop is not to present a collection of recent results but rather to explicitly highlight what we still, as a community, do not know!

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List of Topics

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Current Presenters and Abstracts

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Tentative Schedule

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Target Audience

We expect the workshop to be of interest to researchers working on different aspects of multi-agent systems such as coordination, sensing, distributed decision making, navigation, connectivity control, and energy related issues. We find the workshop in particular useful for young researchers such as students as it provides new directions for future research.

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