A team of drones looking for survivors amidst the rubbles of an earthquake, a squad of mobile robots inspecting a field of interest, and algorithmic traders in a financial network apparently have little in common. In all these scenarios, however, the interplay among the multiple actors involved can be abstracted as a complex network of multiple interacting agents, with cooperative, opportunistic, or even antagonistic behaviors.
In drone networks, multiple agents, mostly unmanned mobile devices, cooperate with each other to achieve a common goal or share a common view of ongoing phenomena in a field of interest. They may act opportunistically, trading-off their application task with their communication needs. Open research challenges include trajectory management, task assignment, and routing issues.
In financial systems, traders, banks, and the stock exchange can also be abstracted in a model of interacting agents, often exhibiting interdependencies that can be studied with the tools of network science and multi-agent systems.
This short talk sets out to describe some of the research goals I have enthusiastically pursued in the recent years, with a focus on the funded projects I have been working on.
08/02/2021