CALL FOR PAPERS

Group Decision and Negotiation (GDN)

Special Issue on "Theory and Practice of Computational Coordination
Mechanisms in Multi-Agent Systems"

Guest Editors: Peyman Faratin (M.I.T.)

&

Nick Jennings (Southampton University)

SCOPE:

Over the past decade the research community within Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) interested in the coordination problem has focused on economically motivated mechanisms for solving conflict in distributed group decision making problems amongst autonomous and individually motivated agents. The result of this effort has been proposals for a set of computational mechanisms such as auctions, bargaining and market mechanisms that have together led to modeling and solution tools applicable to distributed problems as diverse as robot navigation and the allocation of goods in electronic markets. The success of these approaches can be attributed to the successful utilization of a rich theoretical foundation from not only economics but also from computer science. Furthermore, an additional contribution of computer science to this new interface between the social and computer sciences has been generative solutions to computational concerns not originally captured by the economic theories.

The overall goal of this special issue is to further explore this union between the theoretical and computational perspectives by bringing together decision theorists (social welfare, game and decision theorists) with computational theorists (computer science, operations research, decision support systems). Papers are particularly encouraged that explore the benefits and limitations of current models of social choice (e.g. voting, bargaining, auctions, markets), as well as other non-classical models (e.g. argumentation), for implementational purposes as computational mechanisms. Also of particular interest to the issue is the interaction and dependencies that exist between not only the theory and the system but also the users whose preferences define the interactions within the MAS.

In general, topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• comparative computational analysis of social choice theories
  
• methodologies and algorithms for model implementation
  
• preference modeling
  
• user-agent interactions
• complexity of computation in coordination mechanisms
• models of bounded rationality and the coordination problem
• coordination heuristics
• classical and non-classical reasoning, computation and coordination

SUBMISSION DETAILS:

Please submit your original papers in PDF or Postscript format directly
to P. Faratin at peyman@mit.edu. The papers should
follow the format specified on the DGN page at
http://www.kluweronline.com/issn/0926-2644

Prospective authors should kindly send their intentions to submit in
advance to either co-editor.

IMPORTANT DATES:

1st May, 2002: Manuscripts DUE

15th Sept 2002: Author Notifications

SPECIAL ISSUE GUEST EDITORS:

P. Faratin
Sloan School of Management
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
http://ccs.mit.edu/peyman/

N.R. Jennings
Department of Electronics and Computer Science
Southampton University
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~nrj/