Distributed and Multi-Agent Planning (DMAP)

Multi-agent planning is a broad field with many applications, but its subfields remain mostly dispersed and uncoordinated. The main goal of the 4th Workshop on Distributed and Multi-Agent Planning (DMAP), as in the previous editions, is to bring researchers working in these subfields together and to bridge the gap between the planning and multi-agent systems communities. DMAP-16 will be a part of the ICAPS 2016 conference.

For questions please contact the DMAP chairs

Invited Talk

Speaker: Nora Ayanian, Gabilan Assistant Professor of Computer Science (USC Viterbi School of Engineering)

Title: Multirobot Coordination: From High-level Specification to Correct Execution

Abstract

Using a group of robots in place of a single complex robot to accomplish a complex task has many benefits such as redundancy and robustness, faster completion times, and the ability to be everywhere at once. The applications of such systems are wide and varied, including search and rescue, surveillance, and environmental monitoring. These missions demand different roles for robots, necessitating a strategy for coordinated autonomy while respecting any constraints the particular environment or other team members may impose. As a result, current solutions for multirobot systems are often task- and environment-specific, requiring hand-tuning and an expert in the loop. This limits their use and results in challenges in deployment such as inflexibility, reduced situational awareness, and the need for multiple operators.

I will present approaches for automatically synthesized feedback policies for navigating groups of robots in such constrained environments. These approaches automatically and concurrently solve the task assignment, path planning, and control synthesis problems, and are specified at a high level, for example, using an iPad interface to navigate a complex environment with a team of UAVs. This results in controllers that are easy to specify, flexible to user input, require no hand-tuning, and are guaranteed to satisfy the constraints of the environment and problem. I will also present some preliminary work on an innovative approach to developing novel interaction methods and feedback policies for many types of multirobot tasks, by using crowdsourced multi-player games.

Topics

The organizing committee of DMAP'16 invites paper submissions on topics related to distributed and multi-agent planning. Relevant topics to the workshop are, among others:

• Multiagent planning and scheduling applications
• Privacy in distributed planning
• Multiagent path finding
• Techniques to overcome multiagent planning complexity
• Plan coordination/merging
• Distributed planning and scheduling
• Multiagent planning system architectures
• Multi-robot systems
• Self-interested planning agents
• Game theoretic planning
• Distributed planning under uncertainty
• Evaluation and benchmarks for distributed planning
• Centralized, decentralized and factored multiagent planning
• Multiagent planning problem modeling techniques and languages
• Domain-dependent and domain-independent multiagent planning
• Heuristics for multiagent planning

Workshop Format

The DMAP'16 workshop will be organized in technical sessions. Each presentation will be followed by ample time for questions, discussions. The workshop is accompanied by a tutorial and invited talk.

Schedule

Tuesday (June 14, 2016)

Important Dates

• Paper submission deadline: March 21st, 2016
• Notification of acceptance: April 1st, 2016
• Workshop date: June 14th, 2016

Organizing Committee

• Antonín Komenda (Czech Technical University in Prague, Czech Republic)
• Guy Shani (Ben Gurion University, Israel)
• Roni Stern (Ben Gurion University, Israel)
• Dániel Laszlo Kovacs (Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Hungary)
• Chris Amato (University of New Hampshire, USA)