Multiagent resource allocation by Ulle Endriss and Nicolas Maudet

Course description:

The allocation of resources within a system of autonomous agents, that not only have preferences over alternative allocations of resources but also actively participate in computing an allocation, is an exciting area of research at the interface of Computer Science and Economics. This tutorial will cover some of the most salient issues in Multiagent Resource Allocation. In particular, we are going to review various languages to represent the preferences of individual agents over alternative allocations of resources, as well as different measures of social welfare to assess the overall quality of an allocation. We are also going to discuss pertinent issues regarding  allocation procedures and present important complexity results. The tutorial will emphasise two important themes in Multiagent Resource Allocation: (1) properties of distributed negotiation schemes; and (2) the consideration of fair division issues in multiagent systems research.

Tutor bio:

Ulle Endriss is Assistant Professor at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) at the University of Amsterdam. Before moving to Amsterdam he completed a PhD in Logic and Computation at King's College London and worked for three years as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Imperial College London on an EC-funded research project on Multiagent Systems. His research interests include computational social choice, negotiation, fair division, and logic in artificial intelligence.

Nicolas Maudet is Assistant Professor at LAMSADE, Univ. Paris-Dauphine.  He holds a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the Univ. Paul Sabatier (Toulouse), and spent one year as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Imperial College and City University (London), working on a Multiagent Systems project. His research interests are centred around agent interaction, including in particular distributed resource allocation and multiagent argumentation.