9th International Workshop on Agent-Oriented Software Engineering
Estoril, Portugal, 12/05/2008–13/05/2008
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 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 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 stricly 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 semi autonomous interacting processes. The AOSE-2008 workshop will build on the success of the eight previous 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 has been 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; the intention is again to publish the proceedings with Springer. We also plan for a special issue of a journal in addition to the Springer proceedings.
topics of interest
- 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)
- In addition to papers of general interest, we hope to have two special tracks: one is a Development Case Studies track , the other is a Development Support track . Topics for these tracks are different from the previous ones. Further details can be found on the Special Tracks page
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ArgMAS 2008 @ AAMAS 2008 • 
Using and Extending the SPEM Specifications to Represent Agent Oriented Methodologies (paper in proceedings, 2009) — Valeria Seidita, Massimo Cossentino, Salvatore Gaglio