Tools and applications for multi-agent coordination

As multi-agent systems become more abundant and increase in scale, there is a growing need for efficient mechanisms, that determine how the agents share knowledge, coordinate and collaborate.

Practical applications of multi-agent systems include autonomous vehicles, drones, service robots, sensor networks, wearable sensors, IoT devices, and last but not least, humans.

Ideally, these multi-agent systems would quickly reach optimal solutions, produce strategy-proof and fair outcomes, relying on distributed decision making, using minimum communication and computation overhead. In reality however, obtaining these objectives in large scale systems is challenging, and requires creative integration of knowledge and tools from different research areas.

In this talk I will present a number of multi agent applications, discuss the challenges they present, and the diverse set of tool used to design efficient solution methods, including Distributed Constraint Optimization, Computational Geometry, Game Theory, Planning, Human Robot Interaction, and Reinforcement Learning.