Children in the forest: towards a canonical problem of spatio-temporal collaboration

Canonical problems are simplified representations of a class of real world problems. They allow researchers to compare algorithms in a standard setting which captures the most important challenges of the real world problems being modeled. Such examples are the block world for planning, two-player games for algorithms which learn the behavior of the opponent agent, or the “split the pie” game for a large class of negotiation problems. In this paper we focus on negotiating collaboration in space and time, a problem with many important real world applications. Although technically a multi-issue negotiation, we show that the problem can not be represented in a satisfactory manner by the split the pie model. We propose the “children in the rectangular forest” (CRF) model as a possible canonical problem for negotiating spatio-temporal collaboration. By exploring a centralized and a peer-to-peer negotiation based solution, we demonstrate that the problem captures the main challenges...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: ATAL
• Authors: Yi Luo, Ladislau Bölöni
• Keywords: ATAL 2007, Canonical Problem, Important Real World, Real World Problems