Aims and Scope
This competition is an attempt to stimulate research in the area of multi-agent system development and programming by
- identifying key problems,
- collecting suitable benchmarks, and
- gathering test cases which require and enforce coordinated action
that can serve as milestones for testing multi-agent programming languages, platforms and tools. We also expect that participating at the contest helps to debug existing systems and to identify their weak and strong aspects.
The performance of a particular system will be determined in a series of games where the systems compete against each other. While winning the competition is not the main point, we hope it will shed light on the applicability of certain frameworks to particular domains.
History
The Multi-Agent Programming Contest was initiated in 2005 by Mehdi Dastani (Utrecht University) and Jürgen Dix (Clausthal University of Technology) as co-organizers by request from the CLIMA community. Already heavily engaged in 2005, Peter Novák (Delft University of Technology) joined as co-organizer in 2006.
Since then the participating teams and their strategies were published within the CLIMA or ProMAS proceedings. In recent years, we also published special journal issues for a more detailed description of the results of the contest.