AOSE 2002

3rd International Workshop on Agent-Oriented Software Engineering
Bologna, Italy, 15/07/2002

Over the past three decades, 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 multiagent 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 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.

The AOSE-2002 workshop will build on the success of BOTH the AOSE-2000 workshop, held at the ICSE2000 conference in Limerick, Ireland, in June 2000 and the AOSE-2001 workshop held at the Fifth International Conference on Autonomous Agents (Agents 2001). The proceedings of bothworskops were formally published by Springer-Verlag, and there are similar plans for AOSE-2002.

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 AOSE to other SE 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
  • Model checking for agent-oriented systems
  • Engineering large-scale agent systems
  • Experiences with field-tested agent systems
  • System deployment using standards such as FIPA, JASS
  • Best practice in agent-oriented development
  • Market and other economic models in agent systems engineering
  • 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
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worldAP2PC 2002 @ AAMAS 2002
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origin event for publication
page_white_acrobatModeling Agents and their Environment (paper in proceedings, 2003) — James J. Odell, H. Van Dyke Parunak, Mitch Fleischer, Sven Brueckner
page_white_acrobatAgent-Oriented Software Engineering III (edited volume, 2003) — Fausto Giunchiglia, James Odell, Gerhard Weiss
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colocated event for
worldAP2PC 2002 @ AAMAS 2002
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