CALL FOR PAPERS

		 The First International Workshop on

	   AGENT-ORIENTED SOFTWARE ENGINEERING (AOSE-2000)

		  June 10, 2000 - Limerick, Ireland

              http://www.csc.liv.ac.uk/~mjw/aose2000/

			    To be held at
	        the 22nd International Conference on
		   Software Engineering (ICSE-2000)


Software engineers have derived a progressively better understanding
of the characteristics of complexity in software.  It is now widely
recognised that *interaction* is probably the most important single
characteristic of complex software. 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.

Unfortunately, it turns out that many (if not most) real-world
applications have precisely these characteristics. As a consequence, a
major research topic in computer science over at least the past two
decades has been the development of tools and techniques to model,
understand, and implement systems in which interaction is the norm.
Indeed, many researchers now believe that in future, computation
itself will be understood as chiefly as a process of interaction.

Since the 1980s, software agents and multi-agent systems have grown
into what is now one of the most active areas of research and
development activity in computing generally. There are many reasons
for the current intensity of interest, but certainly one of the most
important is that 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 recognition has led to the growth of interest in agents as a new
paradigm for software engineering. In this workshop for ICSE2000 we
will seek to examine the credentials of agent-based approaches as a
software engineering paradigm, and to gain an insight into what
agent-oriented software engineering will look like.


PUBLICATION OF PROCEEDINGS

An informal proceedings will be printed and distributed at the
workshop. Revised papers from the workshop will be formally published
by Springer-Verlag shortly after the workshop is held.


TOPICS OF INTEREST

We welcome the submission of all papers on aspects of agent oriented
software engineering, but particularly the following:

* Methodologies for agent-oriented analysis and design

* Relationship of agent-oriented software to other paradigms (e.g., OO);

* UML and agent systems;

* Agent-oriented requirements analysis and specification;

* 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;

* Engineering large-scale agent systems;

* Experiences with field-tested agent systems;

* Best practice in agent-oriented development;

* Market and other economic models in agent systems engineering;

* Practical coordination and cooperation frameworks for agent systems;

A number of other topics of interest have also been identified for the
workshop; see the workshop WWW site for details.


SUBMISSION DETAILS

Those wishing to participate in the workshop should submit an original
research paper of up to 5000 words (approximately 13 pages maximum) to
the workshop chair, to arrive no later than 25 February
2000. Electronic submission in PostScript or PDF is mandatory.  The
first page should include the full name and contact details (including
email, full postal address, and telephone number) of at least one
author.


IMPORTANT DATES *** PLEASE NOTE NEW DATES AS FOLLOWS ***

Submissions due        Friday February 25, 2000
Notifications sent     Friday March 24, 2000
Workshop               Saturday June 10 2000


ORGANISING COMMITTEE

Paolo Ciancarini (chair)  
  University of Bologna, Italy
  email ciancarini@cs.unibo.it

Michael Wooldridge (co-chair)
  University of Liverpool, UK
  email M.J.Wooldridge@csc.liv.ac.uk


ABOUT ICSE 2000

ICSE is the premier international conference on software engineering,
and was attended by 900 delegates in 1999. By holding AOSE-2000 at
ICSE, we hope to build bridges between the software engineering and
agents communities, to the benefit of both. For travel information to
Limerick, see
	  
http://www.ul.ie/~icse2000/travel.html


PROGRAM COMMITTEE

* Dennis Heimbinger    
* Michael Huhns
* Nicholas Jennings
* Yannis Labrou
* Jaeho Lee
* James Odell
* Andrea Omicini
* Jan Treur
* Jeffrey Tsai
* Robert Tolksdorf
* Franco Zambonelli