ESAW'08
24/25/26 September 2008
The 9th Annual International Workshop "Engineering Societies in the Agents World"
Call for papers & scope
Ninth International Workshop
"Engineering Societies in the Agents World" (ESAW'08)
September 24-26 2008
École Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Saint-Étienne (ENSM-SE)
Saint-Étienne, France
https://www.emse.fr/esaw2008
Call for papers (PDF - A5)
Aims & Scope
Software systems are undergoing dramatic changes in scale and complexity. Whether at a planetary scale with Web-based systems or at a microscopic scale with nanotechnologies, there is a huge amount of components interacting dynamically. Whatever the component granularity is, their interactions provide us with increasingly complex, context-aware, and content-adaptive services and functionalities. There is therefore a strong qualitative impact on the nature, substance and style of interactions between components. At the macro-level the system is viewed as the result of the interactions between micro-level components. These interactions will occur in patterns and via mechanisms that can hardly be grasped in terms of classical models of interaction. To some extent, inspiration should be taken from natural systems and societies for future software systems will exhibit characteristics closer to these than to mechanical systems and traditional software architectures. For example, future systems may need to have self-assembling capabilities in order to enable the emergence of the 'correct' collective behaviour.
This situation poses exciting challenges to computer scientists and software engineers. Already, software agents and multi-agent systems are recognised as both useful abstractions and effective technologies for the modelling and building of complex distributed applications. However, little is done with regard to effective and methodical development of complex software systems in terms of multi-agent societies. An urgent need exists for novel approaches to software modelling and software engineering that can support the successful deployment of software systems made up of a massive number of autonomous components. We need to enable designers to control and predict the behaviour of their systems, but alternatively to enable emergent global system properties and discovered functionality to be commonplace. It is very likely that such innovations will exploit lessons from a variety of different scientific disciplines, such as sociology, philosophy, economics, organisation science, modern thermodynamics, and biology. Furthermore, since these systems will be ubiquitous, persistent, and pervasive, i.e. embedded in the real world, we need to know what frameworks of law will facilitate their regulation.
The sequel to successful editions since 2000, ESAW 08 remains committed to the use of the notion of multi-agent system as seed for animated, constructive, and highly inter-disciplinary discussions about technologies, methodologies, and tools for the engineering of complex distributed applications. While the workshop places an emphasis on practical engineering issues and applications, it also welcomes theoretical, philosophical, and empirical contributions, provided that they clearly document their connection to the core applied issues. Prospective papers about new paradigms, theories, models are also appreciated.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
- analysis, design, development and verification of agent societies
- engineering open, large-scale multi-agent systems
- models of complex distributed systems with agents and societies
- interaction-coordination patterns in agent societies
- inter-disciplinary approaches for agent societies engineering
- self-* approaches in agent societies
- security, trust and norms in agent societies
- agent-based autonomic systems
- middleware infrastructures for agent societies
- electronic institutions in agent societies
- programming languages and IDE for agent societies
- The role of environment in MAS engineering
- organisatinal models for agent societies
- modelling and engineering simulations as agent societies
- virtual enterprises, organisations and supply chains as agent societies
Invited speakers
- Prof. Paul Bourgine (Ecole Polytechnique, France)
"Distributed Problem Solving in natural and artificial complex systems" - Dr. Klaus Fischer (DFKI, Germany)
"Designing Multiagent Systems - A Model-Driven Approach"
Demonstration session
The aim of the demonstration session is to give participants an opportunity to show and discuss their latest developments on software related to the topics of ESAW'08. Developers interested to participate should submit a short paper (max 3 pages) describing their demonstration. The selection of demonstrations will be done by the organisers based on the relevance for the workshop, quality, novelty, and interest for the public. Selected papers and the corresponding software will be included in the workshop pre-proceedings CD.
The short paper for the demonstration session should be formatted according to the Springer LNAI guidelines and include: title, authors, affiliations, abstract, keywords, software URL (if available), and the description of the software including application domain, used technologies, innovations, and relation to the conference topics.
Submission
The ESAW post-proceedings are typically published by Springer in the LNAI series.
Papers should not exceed 16 pages and should be formatted according to the Springer LNAI guidelines.