Directed Reading

I’m planning my directed reading class this coming semester.  So, basically I have/get to come up with an entire semester’s worth of material.  I might be able to make a class out of it by the time I’m done 🙂 haha.  My subjects are focusing on the areas I want to explore with the bounty hunting task allocation model.

  1. Petri-net models and applications to MAS and task allocation.  Basically I’m thinking that petri-nets can be used to create task allocation problems abstractly.  By doing so I can better gauge the usefulness of different task allocation methods.
  2. Contest Theory and tournament theory.  They are two areas which seem like they have crucial information for helping the bounty hunting method mature.  Explore how aspects such as effort can be incorporated into the task allocation problem to make it more realistic.
  3. Coalitional Game theory and the El Farol Bar problem.  The game theory aspect will help me create better learning algorithms for the bounty hunters and the El Farol problem is very similar to the bounty hunting problem.  Also, look into collectives, a complex systems term that describes a system of selfish agents that have a well defined system level performance measure.
  4. Specific problems in Multiagent Task Allocation.  Namely cooperative, resource dependent, heterogeneous tasks and tasks that have sub-tasks.
  5. Automated Task decomposition for MAS.  This is mainly so that I can explore the idea that behaviors (and possibly tasks) may be automatically reduced to states with single feature transitions hierarchically using only state action pair sequences.  Doing so will allow complex behaviors to be learned without so much work required by the human to decompose the problem.  I’d also like to apply it to tasks.
  6. Learning coalition formation, or automatic organization formation for MAS mainly with coordination in mind.  Main applications focusing on large scale systems like autonomous vehicles, cloud robotics and crisis management.
  7. Large scale MAL/MAS and applications.  autonomous vehicles, cloud robotics and crisis management
  8. Current topics in reinforcement learning and its use in MAS.

I’m working on fleshing out the details before the semester starts so that I might already have the list of papers I want to read.