What’s hot in Multi-Agent Systems?
Multi-agent systems (MAS) research has been a long standing topic in AI that has received a large amount of attention. I was recently fortunate enough to attend the UK-MAS Symposium at the Alan Turing Institute. The aim of the symposium was to bring together researchers from UK universities and practitioners from instury to discuss and outline the current research landscape of MAS. This article summarises some of the symposium content and details the current research and applications of MAS in the UK.
MAS are composed of several autonomous entities, known as agents. These agents do not have to be homogeneous — they could be software agents, robots or even humans. Each agent acts within a shared environment, and has its own set of goals and constraints. MAS research investigates the control and modelling of complex systems made up of these interacting agents.
History of MAS
The symposium began with a history of the research area presented by Michael Wooldridge — a long standing MAS researcher from the University of Oxford. The area of MAS research has evolved greatly overtime, and involves research from many other areas, for example game theory and agent based modelling.
An early development in MAS research, published in 1980 (before the field had firmly been established and gained widespread…
