INFORMATIK 2011 Informatik schafft Communities

Prof. sven Koenig
University of
Southern
California
(USC)
k e y n o t e · t h u r s day, 6 . 1 0 . 2 0 1 1 · 1 6 : 0 0 - 1 7 : 0 0
making Good decisions: Case studies
in Planning and Coordination
Intelligent systems (such as robots or decision-support systems) have
to exhibit goal-directed behavior in real-time, even if they have only
incomplete knowledge of their environment, imperfect abilities to manipulate
it, limited or noisy perception or insufficient reasoning speed.
Several research disciplines study how one can make good decisions,
including artificial intelligence, theoretical computer science, operations
research and economics. One can use ideas from these disciplines to
build intelligent systems. I will present some examples from my research
with a large number of collaborators and students to illustrate that one
can often build even better systems when combining ideas from two or
more of these disciplines.
The focus of this talk will be on replanning and auction-based coordination.
Planning systems often need to replan quickly as their knowledge
changes. Replanning from scratch is often very time consuming but
incremental heuristic search methods can be used to speed it up. I will
give an overview of recent advances on incremental heuristic search.
Similarly, teams of agents often need to coordinate. Auctions in economics
deal with competitive agents that often have long decision cycles,
while auction-based coordination systems deal with cooperative agents
that often have to operate in real-time. I will give an overview of recent
advances on market mechanisms for the allocation of resources in cooperative
domains. I will use examples from robotics as running examples
throughout the talk.
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