The Multi-Agent Programming Contest

(MAPC), is a community-serving effort to facilitate advances in programming multiagent systems (MASs) by developing benchmark problems, enabling head-to-head comparison of MASs, and supporting educational efforts in the design and implementation of MASs. It was started in 2005 and is an annual event that attracts between 5 and 10 teams. It has since been organized by the AI group at Clausthal University of Technology. MAPC is not collocated with any other event. Using our MASSim platform, the participants are running their own systems locally and only interact with the tournament server over the Internet. A steering committee oversees the whole process and determines the organization committee. The scenario changes every other year: the current one is “Agents on Mars.” The goal was to implement a team of heterogeneous, cooperating agents to occupy zones on planet Mars. The infrastructure on Mars is given by a directed graph (300 nodes). Agents could take on roles (explorer, sentinel, saboteur, repairer, inspector) and needed to cooperate in an environment with incomplete knowledge so as to win against a competing team: the graph was not known, and each action comes at a price. Conquered terrain brings in money to improve agents. The timeline of the contest is as follows. A preliminary scenario description is published each year in February so that parCompetition Reports