Sunday, December 11th 2016, Afternoon Session (2.00PM - 6.00 PM), Starvine 12

Aria Resort & Casino, Las Vegas, USA

Abstract

Interconnected systems have become the focus of intense investigation, primarily due to the promise of adaptability and scalability compared to single-agent solutions. As recent work has demon- strated, investigations are far-reaching across various disciplines, ranging from sampling, tracking, and coverage, mobility and topology control, to general agent agreement problems.

As a matter of fact, the study of interconnected systems is remarkably complex and highly susceptible to fragmentation especially due to the diversity of the research communities involved, ranging from computer science to control. Both a high level view of the fundamental topics that drive interconnected systems, and a fine-grained understanding of each topic is required to truly make progress in the field, and to provide an accessible starting point to new research. An effective approach to attain such goals would be to construct a taxonomy of interconnected systems. To this end, we have initiated a series of workshops, each addressing specific topics at the forefront of interconnected system research. For each of these topics, our goal is to identify those properties that underlie crucial, and yet common, aspects of theory and application. We believe that such a taxonomic approach may lead towards an understanding of the current open problems in each subarea, the relationships between subareas, ultimately yielding a roadmap for new researchers connecting theory and application.

This proposal represents a further step towards building such a taxonomy of interconnected systems after the first four workshops, the first held at IROS14 (http://asimov.usc.edu/~rkwillia/ws/iros14/), the second at ICRA15 (http: //asimov.usc.edu/~rkwillia/ws/icra15/), the third at ACC15 (http://gasparri.dia.uniroma3.it/ ws/acc15/), and the fourth at CDC15 (http://gasparri.dia.uniroma3.it/ ws/cdc15/) focused on the implications of topology, asymmetry, and partial and imperfect information in collaborative systems. In this workshop, we will focus on the difficulties arising from multi-agent networks on large scales. Scalable control paradigms represent an important area of focus for the control community, especially in recent years, in order to capture a more realistic view of interconnected systems. Indeed, next generation multi-agent networks will need to operate at the intersection of decision-making, information optimization, sensing, and mobility, all occurring at large scales with diverse degrees of interconnectivity. Specific problems arising at scale include: security; scalability; appropriate performance metrics (controllability, dependability); communication; the decentralized-centralized spectrum; synchronicity; etc. Our goal is to develop a taxonomy of control methodologies used to address large-scale networks and identify the fundamental features and open problems in this challenging setting.

As our long-term vision for the series is to truly connect workshop topics, we will incorporate notions of asymmetry, partial information, and topological control methodologies in order to relate to the previous workshops in the series. Finally, we aim to build the series across the control and robotics communities, hopefully establishing a bridge between the future requirements of multi- robot applications and novelties in multi-agent theory.

Intended Audience

The goal of this workshop will be to gather researchers in the field of multi-agent systems, with particular interest in the impact of scalability on collaboration, with expertise ranging from network theory to distributed control. We also hope to connect researchers in academia, government, and industry, with interest in beginning the journey towards methodically constructing a taxonomy of interconnected systems.

Organizers



Andrea Gasparri

Dipartimento di Ingegneria
Università degli studi "Roma Tre"
http://gasparri.dia.uniroma3.it
gasparri@dia.uniroma3.it

Ryan K. Williams

Electrical Engineering
University of Southern California
http://robotics.usc.edu/~rkwillia
ryan.k.willia@gmail.com

Bruno Sinopoli

Electrical & Computer Engineering Dept.
Carnegie Mellon University
https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~brunos/
brunos@ece.cmu.edu