7th Agent Technical Fora
co-located with EUMAS 2010
15 December 2010




INTRODUCTION

The Agent Technical Fora have been created by AgentLink III following up on previous special interest groups in AgentLink and AgentLink II European networks. A Technical Fora session consists of several working groups called Technical Forum Groups (TFGs). These groups of researchers and developers share an interest in a specific sub-area of agent and multi-agent technology. Since the end of AgentLink, the Technical Fora have been organized jointly to the EUMAS workshop.

There have been six successful editions of the Agent Technical Fora: Rome, Italy, 30 June - 2 July 2004; Ljubljana, Slovenia, 28 February - 2 March 2005; Budapest, Hungary, 15-17 September 2005; Lisbon, Portugal, 13 December 2006; Hammamet, Tunisia, 12 December 2007; and Bath, UK, 17 December 2008. The Seventh Technical Fora will take place in Paris, France, 15 December 2009 as a joint event with EUMAS 2010.

The Seventh Technical Fora will be a one-day event and will be held the day before the EUMAS workshop (16–17 December 2010).

AIMS

The aims of the Technical Fora are:
  • To facilitate the dynamic development of communities around specific areas of strategic importance for European agent R&D, enabling them to share common problems, issues and results in a manner that other meetings (e.g., academic workshops and conferences) do not allow for.
  • To respond dynamically to fast-changing developments.
  • To establish links with related areas within computing as well as other research disciplines, such as economics and biology.
  • To encourage common actions among participants, leading to the promotion of agent technology in projects and standards.

The following TFGs will be working in this edition:




TFGAOSE Presentation

This seventh edition continues the tradition of the AOSE Technical Forum Group (TFG) started back in 2004. The scope of this Technical Forum (TF) is to work on agent-oriented software engineering (AOSE) main challenges and its specific aim is renewing and strengthening the cohesion of the AOSE community that participated in the previous meetings. As a tangible result of these events, several members of this TFG now share common research activities and projects originated from the discussions they had during the meetings (or after them).

The central topics of this year meeting will be:

  • Filling the gap between AOSE and agent programming languages
  • Description of agent-oriented methodolgies and their fragments.
The initial work plan for this half-day meeting will deal with presentations by group members and discussions on AOSE-related topics selected by the group members in the AOSE TFG mailing list (al3_aose hosted by the pa.icar.cnr.it mail server).

More information available at this TF website:
Agent Technical Fora 2010
and the TFGAOSE website at:
http://www.pa.icar.cnr.it/cossentino/AOSETF10/


TFGSIM Presentation

Following the tradition of Agent Link TFGs, we announce the first edition of a Simulation Technical Forum Group focussing discussions on methodological and technical aspects of agent- and multi-agent-based simulation.
We will work on identification of and solution suggestions for challenges of agent- and multi-agent-based simulation. We also want to establish links between members of the agent-based simulation community which could lead to common research activities and projects.

More information available at this TF website:
Agent Technical Fora 2010
and the TFGSIM website at:
http://www.irit.fr/TFGSIM


TFGSELFORG Presentation

The general scope of this TFG is to establish the notions, mechanisms, and software engineering principles governing distributed decentralised systems such as large-scale decentralised MAS. The point of focus of the proposed TFG for 2008 will be on the articulations between organisation, re-organisation and self-organisation in such systems.

Since the early days of MAS research the need for dynamically changing the organisational structures in an agent system has been made, for example in order to effectively achieve distributed problem solving. However, centralised re-organisation has many inherent weaknesses which are emphasised in MAS operating in open and insecure environments, rising thus issues concerning, reliability, availability and trust. As a result an increasingly active later strand of MAS research has been focusing on approaches to enable MASs to self-organise following changes in their goals and their environment, in order to better fulfil their mission.

The aim of this TFG is to bring together researchers belonging to the original school that focused on studying efficient organisation and re-organisation approaches in MAS, with those that have primarily concentrated their efforts on models and methods to achieve self-organisation in MAS. Furthermore, participation from people that have actually used these principles in building agent-based software currently used in real world applications is strongly encouraged.

More information available at thise TF website:
Agent Technical Fora 2010
and the TFGSIM website at:
http://www.irit.fr/TFGSO