AOSE 2006

7th International Workshop on Agent-Oriented Software Engineering

Hakodate, Japan, 08/05/2006

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 satisfy 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 strictly 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 semiautonomous interacting processes. The AOSE-2006 workshop will build on the success of the six 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 was 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; Springer has already agreed to publish the proceedings if AOSE-2006 if the workshop is accepted.

temi di interesse

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)