About Us

The Consortium for Distributed Decision Making consists of researchers, faculty and industry members from around the world, who focus on Multi-Agent Distributed Decision Making. The members are from various disciplines and share their information to develop a coherent set of theories, tools and protocols necessary for operating distributed systems. Individuals within the group focus on the acquisition, organization and processing of information, and the application of this knowledge to large scale, complex systems.

Some of the current applications include:

• Next generation space shuttle design,
• Self-sustaining smart sensors networks,
• Collaborative, adaptive networks of radar for low-altitude weather predictions,
• Multi-agent models of e-manufacturing and supply chains,
• Effective coordination in emergency response systems,
• Distributed energy generation and congestion based pricing for energy market design,
• Understanding behavior of social insects, such as ants and termites,
• HIV/infectious disease spread models to evaluate the efficacy of intervention strategies.

The CDDM laboratory currently houses a 80 node computational grid which tests different coordination, collaboration and decision making protocols. Our grid is also networked to national grids such as NASA’s Information Power Grid, DOE Science Grid, and the NSF TeraGrid allowing user-friendly access while at the same time increasing the computational resources available to its members.

Currently, the CDDM is comprised of renowned faculty members and researchers from associated universities such as the University of Minnesota, SUNY Stony Brook, Valdosta State, Oxford University, University of Guelph, Polytechnic de Milano, Tech U of Berlin, and the University of Massachusetts. The faculty have established records of research ties and funding from several state and federal agencies including NASA, NIST, DoD, DoT, ARO, ONR, and DARPA. The Consortium is also in the process of forming an alliance with other educational institutions in the Western Massachusetts Region (Amherst, Hampshire, Mt. Holyoke, Smith and Umass) to establish a 5 College Grid Consortium that will allow its members to leverage additional resources and provide access to a wider audience.

Industrial partners include SUN Microsystems and IBM, who contributed the computational hardware necessary to complete the grid, and partners such as General Motors, Lockheed Martin, SKF and PCB, who have awarded financial resources to conduct research. The CDDM has also collaborated with other business and industrial partners to serve as a benchmarking facility for software, hardware and business practices to provide a test bed for new products and research concepts.

The Consortium is based within the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at the University of Massachusetts/Amherst campus. Business/industrial partners, government agencies and faculty/students are encouraged to contact us.