Related papers: Investigation of "Enhancing flexibility and robust…
Achieving safety in autonomous multi-agent systems, particularly in time-critical tasks like rendezvous, is a critical challenge. In this paper, we propose a distributionally robust risk framework for analyzing cascading failures in…
Coordination is a desirable feature in multi-agent systems, allowing the execution of tasks that would be impossible by individual agents. We study coordination by a team of strategic agents choosing to undertake one of the multiple tasks.…
Time-inconsistency is a characteristic of human behavior in which people plan for long-term benefits but take actions that differ from the plan due to conflicts with short-term benefits. Such time-inconsistent behavior is believed to be…
The execution time of programs is a key element in many areas of computer science, mainly those where achieving good performance (e.g., scheduling in cloud computing) or a predictable one (e.g., meeting deadlines in embedded systems) is the…
Delays in activities completion drive human projects to schedule and cost overruns. It is believed activity delays are the consequence of multiple idiosyncrasies without specific patterns or rules. Here we show that is not the case. Using…
We propose a per-task leverage ratio for human-agent collaboration: human work displaced by an agent, divided by the human time required to specify the task, resolve mid-run interrupts, and review the result. The denominator decomposes into…
Runtime variability in computing systems causes some tasks to straggle and take much longer than expected to complete. These straggler tasks are known to significantly slowdown distributed computation. Job execution with speculative…
This paper studies robust tracking control for a leader-follower multi-agent system (MAS) subject to disturbances. A challenging problem is considered here, which differs from those in the literature in two aspects. First, we consider the…
Flexibility is often claimed as a competitive advantage when proposing new network designs. However, most proposals provide only qualitative arguments for their improved support of flexibility. Quantitative arguments vary a lot among…
We analyze the problem of scheduling in wireless networks to meet end-to-end service guarantees, defined by instantaneous throughput and hard packet deadlines. Using a network slicing model to decouple the queueing dynamics between flows,…
We study the problem of scheduling jobs on fault-prone machines communicating via a shared channel, also known as multiple-access channel. We have $n$ arbitrary length jobs to be scheduled on $m$ identical machines, $f$ of which are prone…
In operations of multi-agent teams ranging from homogeneous robot swarms to heterogeneous human-autonomy teams, unexpected events might occur. While efficiency of operation for multi-agent task allocation problems is the primary objective,…
Motivated by the widespread adoption of iterative project management techniques, we study the effects of workflow -- iterative or sequential -- on innovative behavior and performance. We conduct a series of laboratory experiments. Our first…
Recently we studied communication delay in distributed control of untimed discrete-event systems based on supervisor localization. We proposed a property called delay-robustness: the overall system behavior controlled by distributed…
We demonstrate that standard delay systems with a linear instantaneous and a delayed nonlinear term show weak chaos, asymptotically subdiffusive behavior, and weak ergodicity breaking if the nonlinearity is chosen from a specific class of…
This paper studies the problem of congestion control and scheduling in ad hoc wireless networks that have to support a mixture of best-effort and real-time traffic. Optimization and stochastic network theory have been successful in…
While sequential task assignment for a single agent has been widely studied, such problems in a multi-agent setting, where the agents have heterogeneous task preferences or capabilities, remain less well-characterized. We study a…
We consider the problem of stragglers in distributed computing systems. Stragglers, which are compute nodes that unpredictably slow down, often increase the completion times of tasks. One common approach to mitigating stragglers is work…
Many safety-critical real-time systems operate under harsh environment and are subject to soft errors caused by transient or intermittent faults. It is critical and yet often very challenging to apply fault tolerance techniques in these…
Joint scheduling and routing of data flows with deadline constraints in communication networks has been attracting research interest. This type of problem distinguishes from conventional multicommodity flows due to the presence of the time…