[agents] CFP Optimisation in Multi-Agent Systems (OPTMAS) @ AAMAS 2013

Fri Dec 14 11:21:57 EST 2012

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               	      CFP: Sixth International Workshop on

          	Optimisation in Multi-Agent Systems (OPTMAS VI)
          	^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

                      To be held in conjunction with the

   Twelfth International Conference on Autonomous and Multi-Agent Systems
       				     (AAMAS 2013)

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Workshop Website
---------------------------
optmas2013.org

Call
------

This workshop invites works from different strands of the multi-agent
systems community that pertain to the design of algorithms, models,
and techniques to deal with multi-agent optimisation problems. In so
doing, this workshop aims to provide a forum for researchers to
discuss common issues that arise in solving optimisation problems in
different areas and elaborate common benchmarks to test their
solutions.

Important dates
-----------------------

* January, 30, 2013 - Submission of contributions to workshops

* February 27, 2013 - Workshop paper acceptance notification

* March 8, 2013 - Submission of camera-ready version

* May 6 or 7, 2013 - Workshop takes place in conjunction with AAMAS 2013.

Background
-----------------

The number of novel applications of multi-agent systems has followed
an exponential trend over the last few years, ranging from online
auction design, through in multi-sensor networks, to scheduling of
tasks in multi-actor systems. Multi-agent systems designed for all
these applications generally require some form of optimization in
order to achieve their goal.

Given this, a number of advancements have been made in the design of
winner determination, coalition formation, and distributed constraints
optimization algorithms among others. However, there are no general
principles guiding the design of such algorithms that would enable
researchers to either exploit algorithms designed in other areas or to
ensure that their algorithms conform to some level of applicability to
real problems.

This workshop aims to address the above issues by bringing together
researchers from different parts of the Multi-Agent Systems research
area to present their work and discuss acceptable solutions,
benchmarks, and evaluation methods for generally researched
optimization problems.

In particular, the main issues to be addressed by the workshop include
(but are not limited to):

- Techniques to model and solve optimisation problems in which the actors
are partly or completely distributed and can only communicate with their peers.

- Algorithms to compute solutions to mechanisms that deal with
different stakeholders who may be self interested or may have
different computation/communication capabilities from their peers.

- Techniques to manage and disseminate relevant information across
different agents.

- Dealing with privacy concerns: solving complex optimization problems
while leaking as little private information as possible

- Problems that require anytime algorithms.

- Algorithms that need to provide guarantees on the quality of the solution.

- Mechanisms whose properties can be significantly affected if the
solution computed is not the optimal one.

- Techniques to deal with optimizations that have to be repeated with
possibly only slight changes in the input data.

- Techniques to deal with situations where the input data may be
uncertain or unreliable, requiring that the solution computed be
robust to slight differences from the true values.

- Techniques to deal with agents that are tied to physical devices.
This involves computation and communication constraints that need to
be considered in the coordination techniques, as well as the
possibility of failures of the devices and communication links.

- Benchmarks for optimisation algorithms in dynamic environments.

Keywords
--------------

Topics include but are not limited to:

* Distributed Constraints Optimisation/Satisfaction

* Winner Determination Algorithms in Auctions

* Coalition Formation Algorithms

* Algorithms to compute Nash Equilibrium in games

* Optimisation under uncertainty

* Optimisation with incomplete or dynamic input data

* Algorithms for real-time applications

Submission
-----------------

Submissions should conform to the LNCS Springer format,  Authors are
encouraged to use the following style file
ftp://ftp.springer.de/pub/tex/latex/llncs/latex2e/llncs2e.zip or see
http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-793341-0 for more
details.

Submission should not be more than *16* pages long (excluding
appendices and assuming the LNCS format above).

Authors can submit their papers through the OPTMAS 2013 Easychair
submission site:
https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=optmas2013

Reviewing process
---------------------------

Papers will be reviewed by at least 2 reviewers. Criteria for
selection of papers will include: originality, readability, relevance
to themes, soundness, and overall quality.

Publication
-----------------

Best papers from OPTMAS 2008 and OPTMAS 2009 were selected for
publication in the
special issue on Optimisation in Multi-Agent System of the Journal of
Autonomous and Multiagent Systems.

We have negotiated a special issue on Optimisation in Multi-Agent
System with the Computer Journal, and we are now selecting best papers
from OPTMAS 2010, OPTMAS 2011 and OPTMAS 2012.
We plan to continue this initiative for the following editions of OPTMAS.

Organizing committee
--------------------------------

Dr. Jesús Cerquides Bueno, IIIA - CSIC, Spain
Dr. Alessandro Farinelli, University of Verona, Italy
Dr. Sarvapali D. Ramchurn University of Southampton, UK
Dr. Juan Antonio Rodriguez-Aguilar,IIIA - CSIC, Spain
Dr. Meritxell Vinyals, University of Southampton, UK
Dr. Archie Chapman, University of Sydney, Austrlia

Programme Committee (More to be added)
--------------------------------------------------------------

Robert N. Lass     Drexel University
Toni Penya-Alba    IIIA-CSIC
Long Tran-Thanh    University of Southampton
Sam Miller      University of Southampton
Roie Zivan Ben Gurion University
Kate Larson    University of Waterloo
Maria Polukarov    University of Southampton
Bo An    Chinese Academy of Sciences
Pradeep Varakantham    Singapore Management University
Greet Vanden Berghe    Kaho Sint-Lieven
Akshar Kumar    University of Massachusetts
Chongjie Zhang    University of Massachusetts
Francesco Delle Fave     University of Southern California
William Yeoh    New Mexico State University
Sven Koenig    University of Southern California
Sameer Singh    University of Massachusetts
Onn Shehory    IBM Haifa Research Lab
Emma Rollon    Technical University of Catalonia
Makoto Yokoo   Kyushu University
Patricia Gutierrez  IIIA-CSIC

-- 
Dr. Alessandro Farinelli
Computer Science Department
University of Verona
Ca' Vignal 2, Strada Le Grazie 15, 37134 Verona, Italy
Phone: +39 045 802 7072
Fax: +39 045 802 7068
E-mail: alessandro.farinelli at univr.it
Web Page http://profs.sci.univr.it/~farinelli/