AOSE 2004

5th International Workshop on Agent-Oriented Software Engineering

New York, NY, USA, 19/07/2004

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-2004 workshop will build on the success of the four previous AOSE workshops. The 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); and the AOSE-2002 workshop was held at AAMAS 2002; and the AOSE-2003 workshop was held at AAMAS 2003. The proceedings of all workshops were formally published by Springer-Verlag, and there are similar plans for AOSE-2004.

temi di interesse

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
Model-driven architecture (MDA) for MAS
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
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