Coordination Techniques for Cooperative Agents
This lecture will cover the major approaches for implementing cooperative agent coordination. It will discuss such distinctions as bottom-up v s top-down, results sharing vs. task sharing, logic based approaches vs. quantitative approaches, reactive vs planning approaches, group coordination vs. society coordination. It will present in detail coordination frameworks such as the Contract-Net, Partial Global Planning (PGP and GPGP), GRATE, STEAM and DEC MDPs.

Victor R. Lesser received his B.A. in Mathematics from Cornell University in 1966, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science in the area of computer architecture from Stanford University in 1969 and 1972, respectively. He has been a professor in the Computer Science Department of the University of Massachusetts on the Amherst campus since 1977 and in 1992 became the director of the Multi-Agent Systems Laboratory. Professor Lesser was General Chairman of the First International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems (ICMAS) held in 1995, the founding president of International Foundation for Multi-Agent Systems (IFMAS), and a founding fellow of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). His major research focus is on the control and organization of complex AI systems. He has been working in the field of Multi-Agent Systems and Distributed Sensor Networks for close to 30 years. Prior to coming to the University of Massachusetts, he was a research scientist at Carnegie- Mellon University where he was the systems architect for the Hearsay- II speech understanding system, which was the first blackboard system developed. In addition to this work, he has also done research in computer architecture, parallel and distributed processing, information gathering, sound understanding, intelligent user interfaces and real-time agent architectures. His work is widely cited and includes over 500 publications.