AGENT ORIENTED SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
at AAMAS 2008
12-13 May, 2008
Published the workshop programme
INTRODUCTION
Since the mid 1980s, software agents and multi-agent systems have grown
into a very active area of research and also commercial development
activity. One of the limiting factors in industry take up of agent
technology is however the lack of adequate software engineering
support, and knowledge in this area.
The concept of an agent as an autonomous system, capable of interacting
with other agents in order to satisy its design objectives, is a
natural one for software designers. Just as we can understand many
systems as being composed of essentially passive objects, which have
state, and upon which we can perform operations, so we can understand
many others as being made up of interacting, semi-autonomous agents.
This paradigm is especially suited to complex systems.
Software architectures that contain many dynamically interacting
components, each with their own thread of control, and engaging in
complex coordination protocols, are typically orders of magnitude more
complex to correctly and efficiently engineer than those that simply
compute a function of some input through a single thread of control, or
through a limited set of stricly synchronized threads of control. Agent
oriented modelling techniques are especially useful in such
applications.
Many current and emerging real-world applications - spanning scenarios
as diverse as worldwide computing, network enterprises, ubiquitous
computing, sensor networks, just to mention a few examples - have
exactly the above characteristics. As a consequence, agent oriented
software engineering has become an important area: both as a design
modelling tool, and as an interface to platforms which include
specialised infrastructure support for programming in terms of semi
autonomous interacting processes.
The AOSE-2008 workshop will build on the success of the eight previous
AOSE workshops. The first AOSE-2000 workshop was held at the ICSE2000
conference in Limerick, Ireland, in June 2000; The AOSE-2001 workshop
was held at the Fifth International Conference on Autonomous Agents
(Agents 2001); since 2002, the AOSE workshop has been co-located with
the International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents &
Multi-Agent Systems AAMAS). The proceedings of all workshops were
formally published by Springer-Verlag; the intention is again to
publish the proceedings with Springer. We also plan for a special issue
of a journal in addition to the Springer proceedings.
TOPICS OF INTEREST
The workshop welcomes the submission of all papers on aspects of agent
oriented software engineering. A non-exaustive list of relevant topics
include:
* Methodologies for agent-oriented analysis and design
* Agent-oriented requirements analysis and specification;
* Relationship of AOSE to other SE paradigms (e.g., OO);
* Process models for agent-based development
* UML and agent systems;
* Model-driven architecture (MDA) for MAS;
* Service-oriented computing in the context of agent-based systems;
* Refinement and synthesis techniques for agent-based specifications;
* Verification and validation techniques for agent-based systems;
* Software development environments and CASE tools for AOSE;
* Standard APIs for agent programming;
* Formal methods for agent-oriented systems, including specification
and verification logics;
* Model checking for agent-oriented systems;
* Engineering of large-scale agent systems;
* Experiences with field-tested agent systems;
* Best practice in agent-oriented development;
* Practical coordination and cooperation frameworks for agent systems;
* Standardisations for AOSE;
* Re-use approaches for agent-oriented software, including design
patterns, frameworks, components, and architectures;
* Integration of agent-oriented software into existing business
processes and implications on business process re-engineering;
* Implications of agent-oriented software on organizational and social
structures within and between companies (e.g. changes in roles,
responsibilities, transparency, business processes and decision
schemes).
PROCEEDINGS
Proceedings will be formally published by Springer-Verlag within the LNCS series. It is already announced in the LNCS forthcoming proceedings section.
Proceedings of the last edition (LNCS 4951) are available online. You can find information about it a t http://www.springeronline.com/978-3-540-79487-5 or access the online version
AAMAS COORDINATION
This workshop has strong links with two other AAMAS workshops: Agent Theory to Agent Implementation (AT2AI) and Programming Multi-Agent Systems (ProMAS). In this spirit, these workshops will coordinate their activities, including the organisation of a joint session. Details will be published here as they are agreed.
CONTACT
For any question about the workshop, please, send an email to aose08(_at_)fdi.ucm.es
A fax is available as well. Send faxes to the number (+ 34) 913947547 to the attention of Jorge Gomez-Sanz with the subject AOSE Workshop