Sarah L. Hickmott

sarah.hickmott@rmit.edu.au

Intelligent Systems (Agents Group) School of CS & IT RMIT University, City Campus Building 14 Level 8 Office 7C GPO BOX 2476 Melbourne, VIC 3001 Australia

Agents Based Modelling and Simulation for exploring uncertain climate futures...

Research questions:
• Development of modular simulation framework to support incremental development of large simulations including agent-based models, where modules use different paradigms and be contributed by a members of a diverse community interested in the application domain
• Use of Belief, Desire, Intention (BDI) agent paradigm in agent-based simulation
• Using agent-based simulation to explore adaptation strategies, with particular focus on the human aspect

Current applications:
• Adaptation of the built environment
• Emergency bushfire response.

Specific Projects:
• An Extensible Agent-Based Framework for Exploring Climate Change Adaptation. Supported by an ARC Discovery Grant. See Project Page.
• Bushfire BLOCKS (Building Large, Open, Complex, Knowledge-based Simulations). Supported by NCCARF . See Project Page.
• Tools for Simulation Modules: Water Sustainability. Supported by Netbalance and the RMIT School of CS and IT. See Project Page .

Intelligent support for defining, measuring and monitoring community and organisation-level sustainability goals...

Specific Projects:
• Accounting for Sustainability: Developing an Integrated Approach for Sustainability Assessments. Supported by an ARC Linkage Grant involving Melbourne City Council, Fuji Xerox, Cambridge International College, and others. See Project Page .

And still thinking about AI Planning and Petri net unfolding...

• Integrating BDI Reasoning into Agent Based Modelling and Simulation Lin Padgham, Dave Scerri, Gaya Jayatilleke and Sarah Hickmott. Winter Simulation Conference (WSC). 2011. To appear.
  
  
• Agents BDI et simulations sociales: Unis pour le meilleur et pour le pire (BDI agents and social simulations) Carole Adam, Benoit Gaudou, Sarah Hickmott and David Scerri. Simulation Sociale Orientee Agent. Revue d'intelligence artificielle. 2010 25(1) pp. 11-42. ISSN 0992-499X. Lavoisier, Cachan, FRANCE (1987) (Revue). [pdf (French Language)]. Please contact me for an English Transaltion.
  
  
• An Architecture for Modular Distributed Simulation with Agent-Based Models Dave Scerri, Sarah Hickmott, Lin Padgham and Alexis Drogoul. In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS). 2010. ACM[pdf]
  
  
• Bushfire BLOCKS: A Modular Agent-based Simulation Dave Scerri, Sarah Hickmott, Fabio Zambetta, Ferdinand Gouw, Isaac Yehuda and Lin Padgham In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS) Demo track. 2010. ACM.[pdf]
  
  
• Optimality properties of planning via Petri net unfolding: A formal analysis. Sarah L. Hickmott, Sebastian Sardina. Alfonso Gerevini and Adele Howe, editors, Proceedings of the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS), pages 170-177, Thessaloniki, Greece, September 2009. AAAI Press. [pdf]
  
  
• An Optimality Principle for Concurrent Systems. Langford B. White, Sarah L. Hickmott. Australasian Conference on Artificial Intelligence 2008: 128-137 [pdf]
  
  
• Directed Unfolding of Petri Nets. Blai Bonet, Patrik Haslum, Sarah Hickmott, Sylvie Thiebaux. LNCS Transactions on Petri Nets and other models of concurrency (ToPNoC). [pdf]
  
  
• Planning via Petri Net Unfolding. Sarah L. Hickmott, Jussi Rintanen, Sylvie Thiebaux, and Langford B. White. In Proc. of the 20th Int. Joint Conf. on Artifical Intelligence (IJCAI-07).[pdf]
  
  
• Concurrent Planning using Petri Net Unfoldings. S. Hickmott In Proceedings of 16th International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS-06) Doctoral Consortium.
  
  
• Reduced MDP Representation of a Logistical Planning Problem Using Petri-Nets. Sanjeev Naguleswaran, Sarah L. Hickmott, Langford B. White. In Proceedings of Australian Conference on Artificial Intelligence 2005.

• Petri Nets and Their Relation to Planning, presented with Blai Bonet, Patrik Haslum, Sylvie Thiebaux and Stefan Edelkamp, at ICAPS 2009. (Contact me for more information)