AOSE 2010

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, however, is the lack of adequate software engineering support, and knowledge in this area. study the synergies between software engineering and agent research. 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, autonomous or 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 means, and as an interface to platforms which include specialised infrastructure support for programming in terms of semi-autonomous interacting processes. The particular focus of this edition will be on how to bridge the gap between AOSE and conventional software engineering. We aim to look at the integration of concepts and techniques from multi-agent systems with conventional engineering approaches on the one hand, and the integration of agent-oriented software engineering and methodologies with conventional engineering processes on the other hand. WORKSHOP STRUCTURE All authors of papers will have only 10 minutes podium time to provide the main idea or the main point of interest of their paper. Per 4 presentations, people will have 50 minutes to discuss with speakers. Depending on the quality of submitted papers, we may consider having two kinds of accepted papers. The first kind of paper will be presented at the workshop and will appear in the post-proceedings. The second ones will be accepted for presentation and they will have an additional opportunity to contribute to the published post-proceedings depending of the paper presentation. The workshop will welcome live demos. These demos would be performed by authors of accepted papers or registered attendants without accepted papers. Authors of accepted papers would be encouraged to show the software supporting their contribution. Researchers not submitting regular papers but interested in showing their software may participate as well. These attendees will be invited to contact the workshop organizers in advance, in order to organize the presentation of their software. Requests will be evaluated by the organizers to determine the relevance and interest for the workshop.