Challenges in Open Multi-Agent Systems Subject to Arrivals and Departures

Departments: Electrical Engineering
Time: Wednesday, March 6, 2019 - 4:00pm - 5:00pm
Type: Seminar Series
Presenter: Julien Hendrickx; Universit Catholique de Louvain; Ecole Polytechnique de Louvain
Room/Office: Room 335
Location:
17 Hillhouse Avenue
New Haven, CT 06511
United States
See map: Google Maps

Yale University Department of Electrical Engineering Seminar

Julien Hendrickx
Professor
Universit Catholique de Louvain
Ecole Polytechnique de Louvain

"Challenges in Open Multi-Agent Systems Subject to Arrivals and Departures"

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 systems, that agents continuously leave and join during the process considered. We discuss the general challenges to analyze and design algorithms for such systems. Arrivals and departures keep indeed perturbing the system, forbidding any classical convergence. Moreover, correction mecha- nisms designed to cope with a small number of arrivals or departures may fail when these events keep taking place. We focus in particular on averaging, decentralized estimation, and computation of the maximum value among agents present in the system. We also present some fundamental performance limitations in open systems.

Julien Hendrickx is a professor of mathematical engineering at Universit Catholique de Louvain, in the Ecole Polytechnique de Louvain. During the current academic year he is a resident scholar at Boston University and holds a WBI.World excellence fellowship. He obtained an engineering degree in applied mathematics (2004) and a PhD in mathematical engineering (2008) from the same university. 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. 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.

Wednesday, March 6
4:00 pm
Room 335, 17 Hillhouse