Multiagent Dynamics Laboratory

Overview

We study the emergent dynamics of multiagent systems in order to devise ways of engineering them from first principles. Specifically, we are interested in finding ways to build adaptive multiagent systems whose behaviors can be predicted and which can satisfy any given requirements specification. We use the tools of game theory, Economics, operations research, and sociology in order to help us understand the behavior of these systems at the theoretical level. We use NetLogo for prototyping and didactive purposes. We hope to deploy on the Semantic Web.

Short term applications of this research include:

• On-demand location-aware agents.
• Distributed document recommendation systems
• Distributed fault-tolerant network computer security.
• Supply-chain automation.
• Distributed Ebay.

• Human cognitive expansion via human-agent and agent-agent cooperation.
• The world-wide mind (WWM) where the aggregate knowledge of the world's experts can be queried at any time.
• Self-organizing nanorobotic swarms.
• Automated nano-frabication by clouds of nanobots.

This research is funded in part by an NSF CAREER grant 2001-2006.

Relationships

We are part of the larger Center for Information Technology headed by Michael Huhns. We try to meet every week as part of the MultiAgent Systems Reading Group. We keep a feed of research announcements from our group and there is also a more general blog on multiagent news and opinion.