Name:         Silvia Andréa

                   Suárez Barón

 

Activity:      PhD Student

 

Office:        Lab 001, Building P4, Univ. of Girona

 

Phone:       + 34 972 41 8478

 

E-mail:       sasuarez@eia.udg.es

 

Web page: http://eia.udg.es/~sasuarez

 

Research Activities:

Research Interests: Multi-agent Systems, Electronic Commerce, Scheduling and resource allocation, Auctions, Combinatorial auctions, Optimization, Search algorithms.

Research Abstract:

Multi-agent Systems are distributed systems, where agents have to interact in order to accomplish their goals. In order to accomplish their objetives, agents requiere coordinate tasks using effectively the available resources in the environment.

We have been interested in the study of task coordination in unpredictable environtments as disaster management domain. The challenges of this study are based on the dynamicity presents in these environments. In addition, agents have to perform their tasks under strong communication and perception constraints and their capabilities can be diminished for the disaster's consequences.

Scheduling and resource allocation has been one topic which many researchers have focused. It deal with how allocate these tasks to agents such they be able to reach their goals, minimizing cost and time factors or maximizing utility. E-commerce techniques such as Auctions have been applied to scheduling in domains such as market architectures. Specifically, a combinatorial auction is a kind of auction which presents a new alternative for task and resource allocation. Two algorithms for the winner determination in combinatorial auctions has been developed: the CASS algorithm and Sandholm's algorithm. We have studied the application and extension of both of them for dynamical environments as rescue domain. The result of this research is oriented to reach effective task and resource allocation in these kinds of scenarios. More information about our research: publications.

We have used as an experimentation testbed the RoboCup Rescue simulator. More information about our rescue research domain: http://eia.udg.es/arl/RescueResearch/index.html