IJCAI-19MAPFWorkshop

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IJCAI-19 Workshop on Multi-Agent Path Finding

Welcome!

Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) is the problem of computing collision-free paths for a team of agents from their current locations to given destinations in a known environment. Application examples include autonomous aircraft towing vehicles, automated warehouse systems, office robots, and game characters in video games. Solving the MAPF problem optimally is NP-hard for many objectives, such as minimizing the sum of the travel costs or the makespan, and can even be NP-hard to approximate. Yet, practical systems must find high-quality collision-free paths for the agents quickly because shorter paths result in higher throughput or lower operating costs (since fewer agents are required).

In recent years, many researchers have explored different variants of the MAPF problem as well as different approaches with different properties. Also, different applications have been studied in artificial intelligence, robotics, and theoretical computer science. The purpose of this workshop is to bring these researchers together to present their research, discuss future research directions, and cross-fertilize the different communities. Researchers and practitioners whose research might apply to MAPF or who might be able to use MAPF techniques in their research are welcome.

Program and Schedule
Here.
Date: August 12, 2019
Room: Florence 2301

Invited Talks

  • 9am-10am, Multi Agent Path Finding: basic, advanced, and forgotten search techniques, Roni Stern.
Bio: Roni Stern is a senior lecturer in Ben Gurion University (BGU) in the department of software and information systems engineering (SISE). He received his Ph.D in 2013 from BGU, M.Sc. from Bar Ilan University, and was a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard university. His main research interests are heuristic search, automated diagnosis, single and multi-agent automated planning. In the past, he served as the Symposium on Combinatorial Search (SoCS) president, served as the program chair (with. Alex Feldman and Rui Muranahu) of the International Symposium on the Principles of Diagnosis (DX), and co-organized the workshop on Distributed Multi-Agent Planning (DMAP), and the Israeli AI day (IAAI).


  • 2pm-3pm, SAT-based Multi-Agent Path Finding, Pavel Surynek.
Bio: Pavel Surynek is an associate professor at the Faculty of Information Technology, Czech Technical University in Prague. He obtained his Ph.D. and M.Sc. in artificial intelligence and theoretical computer science at Charles University in Prague. Prior to joining the Czech Technical University he held the position of research scientist at AIST in Tokyo, the assistant professor position at Charles University, and the position of JSPS fellow at Kobe University. His research interests include multi-agent path finding (MAPF), satisfiability (SAT), and heuristic search.


Organizing Committee

  • Liron Cohen, University of Southern California (lironcoh@usc.edu)
  • Hang Ma, University of Southern California (hangma@usc.edu)
  • Daniel Harabor, Monash University (daniel.harabor@monash.edu)
  • Nathan Sturtevant, University of Alberta (nathanst@ualberta.ca)
  • Ariel Felner, Ben-Gurion University, (felner@bgu.ac.il)
  • Sven Koenig, University of Southern California (skoenig@cs.usc.edu)

PC Members

  • Nora Ayanian, University of Southern California
  • Guni Sharon, Texas A&M
  • Glenn Wagner, CSIRO
  • Pavel Surynek, Czech Technical University
  • Roni Stern, Ben-Gurion University
  • T. K. Satish Kumar, University of Southern California
  • Thayne Walker, University of Denver
  • Wolfgang Hoenig, University of Southern California
  • Eli Boyarski, Ben-Gurion University
  • Jiaoyang Li, University of Southern California
  • Tansel Uras, University of Southern California
  • Dor Atzmon, Ben-Gurion University
  • Han Zhang, University of Southern California

All submissions that relate to collision-free path planning or navigation for multiple agents are welcome, including but not limited to:

  • Search-, rule-, reduction-, reactive-, and learning-based MAPF planners
  • Combination of MAPF and task allocation/scheduling
  • Combination of MAPF and execution monitoring
  • Variants and generalizations of the MAPF problem
  • Application domains for MAPF planners
  • Actual applications of MAPF planners
  • Customization of MAPF planners for actual robots (including kinematic constraints)
  • Standardization of MAPF terminology and benchmarks

Submissions can contain relevant work in all possible stages, including work that was recently published, is under submission elsewhere, was only recently finished, or is still ongoing. Authors of papers published or under submission elsewhere are encouraged to submit these papers or short versions (including abstracts) of them to the workshop to educate other researchers about their work, as long as resubmissions are clearly labeled to avoid copyright violations. Position papers and surveys are also welcome. Submissions will go through a light review process to ensure a fit with the topic of the workshop and acceptable quality. Non-archival workshop notes will be produced containing the material presented at the workshop.

Important dates
Paper submission deadline: May 16, 2019
Paper notification: May 30, 2019
Final version: June 30, 2019
Workshop: August 12, 2019

Information for authors
Submission page: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=womapf19
Format: Any format is acceptable.
Page limitation: There is no limit on the number of pages.\\


(last updated in 2019)