About Me

I'm a Ph.D. candidate at the University of South Carolina working on planning and learning in dynamic, multi-agent environments. My work spans opinion networks, multi-agent path finding for robots, and ontology-driven tools for making planning decisions explainable.

Advised by Prof. Biplav Srivastava and Prof. Vignesh Narayanan at the AI4Society lab.

Automated Planning Multi-Agent Systems Reinforcement Learning Knowledge Representation Ontology & Explainability

Published at:

2026 AAAI Demo MAKE @ AAAI
2024 NeurIPS AAAI Demo ★ Best Demo ICAPS Discover Data
2023 AAAI/IAAI AI Magazine IJCAI Demo
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Featured Research
2024 – Present HI-MAPF: Resource-Efficient Multi-Robot Coordination

A hybrid decentralized planning framework for multi-agent path finding that minimizes inter-robot information sharing. Achieves 2–510× reduction in coordination overhead and tested on physical TurtleBot4 robots.

Multi-Agent Planning Robotics Reinforcement Learning Under Review
2023 – Present Opinion Dynamics & Information Spread Control

Generalized planning combined with graph convolutional networks to select optimal intervention nodes in social networks, reducing misinformation spread by 86% on real-world Cora graph (2000 nodes). Award-winning AAAI 2024 demo.

Generalized Planning Graph Neural Networks Opinion Dynamics
Jan 2022 – Present Planning Ontology & Explainability (PO, maPO, OMEGA)

OWL 2 ontologies for annotating and querying planning decisions. Extends to multi-agent settings via maPO; OMEGA tool generates natural-language explanations for MAPF executions. 95.2% user preference in evaluations.

Ontology Explainability Knowledge Representation
All research projects
Selected Publications

OMEGA: An Ontology-Driven Tool for Explaining Multi-Agent Path Finding

Bharath Muppasani, Ritirupa Dey, Biplav Srivastava, Vignesh Narayanan

DemoAAAI 2026MAPFOntology

maPO: An Ontology for Multi-Agent Path Finding and Its Usage for Explaining Planner Behaviour

Bharath Muppasani, Ritirupa Dey, Biplav Srivastava, Vignesh Narayanan

WorkshopAAAI-MAKE 2026MAPFOntology

Building a Plan Ontology to Represent and Exploit Planning Knowledge and Its Applications

Bharath Muppasani, Nitin Gupta, Vishal Pallagani, Biplav Srivastava, Raghava Mutharaju, Michael N. Huhns, Vignesh Narayanan

JournalDiscover Data 2025Ontology

On Generalized Planning for Controlling Opinion Networks: Interpreting Human-AI Dialog States and Beliefs

Bharath Muppasani, Protik Nag, Biplav Srivastava, Vignesh Narayanan

WorkshopGenPlan, AAAI 2025Opinion Networks

Towards Effective Planning Strategies for Dynamic Opinion Networks

Bharath Muppasani, Protik Nag, Vignesh Narayanan, Biplav Srivastava, Michael N. Huhns

ConferenceNeurIPS 2024Opinion Networks

Expressive and Flexible Simulation of Information Spread Strategies in Social Networks Using Planning

Bharath Muppasani, Vignesh Narayanan, Biplav Srivastava, Michael N. Huhns

DemoAAAI 2024★ Best Demo AwardOpinion Networks
All publications
Experience
2022 – Present Research Assistant

University of South Carolina · AI4Society Lab

Conducting research in automated planning, multi-agent systems, and reinforcement learning. Developing novel approaches for opinion network intervention, multi-agent path finding, and ontology-driven explainability tools.

Automated Planning Machine Learning Ontology
Summer 2018 Research Intern

IIT Kharagpur – Samsung Research

Conducted analysis on multi-resident smart home sensor data using time, frequency-based segmentation. Developed unsupervised algorithms for activity classification.

Data Analysis Sensor Data Smart Home