The MIT Robust Open Multi-Agent Systems (ROMA) Research Group is devoted to learning how we can develop multi-agent systems for open contexts where the constituent agents can come from anywhere, may be buggy or even malicious, and must run in the dynamic and potentially failure-prone environments at hand.
This is an important problem: many emerging problems (e.g. electronic commerce, large product development projects, multi-national rescue operations) require the ability to rapidly assemble virtual organizations on the Internet with partners who may have never worked together before. Agent systems represent a highly promising approach for addressing such challenges, but work to date has focused mainly on closed systems consisting of well-behaved agents developed under centralized control and running on reliable infrastructures.
ROMA is co-directed by Mark Klein , Chris Dellarocas and Benjamin Grosof, and is funded by a mix of DARPA, NSF and industry sponsorship.
For an up-to-date list of publications, please see the web pages of the members of ROMA.