Julien Hendricks - Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium - "Open Multi-Agent Systems with arrivals and departures"

Abstract: Even though scalability and robustness to agent losses are often cited as advantages of multi-agent systems, almost all theoretical results apply to system with fixed compositions. We consider open multi-agent systems where agents can arrive or leave, with departures and arrivals happening on a time-scale similar to that of the process running on the system. We discuss the general challenges to analyze and to design algorithms for such systems. We analyze in particular the case of gossip averaging. We also present algorithms for computing the maximal values among all agents present, and show the impact of allowing leaving agents to send a goodbye message. Finally, we discuss the fundamental performance limitations in an open context.

Bio-sketch: Julien M. Hendrickx received an engineering degree in applied mathematics and a PhD in mathematical engineering from the Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium, in 2004 and 2008, respectively. He has been a visiting researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign in 2003-2004, at the National ICT Australia in 2005 and 2006, and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2006 and 2008. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2009 and 2010, holding postdoctoral fellowships of the F.R.S.-FNRS (Fund for Scientific Research) and of Belgian American Education Foundation. Since September 2010, he is a faculty member of the Université catholique de Louvain, in the Ecole Polytechnique de Louvain. Doctor Hendrickx is the recipient of the 2008 EECI award for the best PhD thesis in Europe in the field of Embedded and Networked Control, and of the Alcatel-Lucent-Bell 2009 award for a PhD thesis on original new concepts or application in the domain of information or communication technologies.