COIN@PRIMA 2013

COIN'13 @ PRIMA is the 16th workshop on Coordination, Organization, Institutions and Norms in multi-agent systems. This year, the workshop has a special track on Agent-based Modelling for Policy Engineering (AMPLE).

This COIN workshop will be held at PRIMA which will take place in Dunedin, New Zealand, 1-6 December 2013

The pervasiveness of open systems raises a range of challenges and opportunities for technologies in the area of autonomous agents and multi-agent systems and in their contribution to human and artificial societies. Open systems comprise loosely-coupled entities interacting within a society, often with some overall measures of quality or efficiency.  However, achieving and maintaining a ‘good’ society, such as through establishing and enforcing societial norms and policies, is difficult to achieve. This is due to the complexity of real societies, and since the participating entities, their modes of interaction, or the intended purpose of the system may change over time.  Moreover, in the case of open multi-agent systems, the autonomy of the agents can work against the effectiveness of the society. There remains a need for tools and techniques for articulating or regulating interactions in order to make the system more effective in attaining collective goals, more certain for participants, or more predictable.

Coordination, organizations, institutions, and norms are four key governance elements for the regulation of open multi-agent systems, and the COIN workshops constitute a space for debate and exploration of these four elements that are central in the design and use of open systems. COIN@PRIMA’13 features a special track on agent-based modelling for policy engineering in societies.

We seek to attract high-quality papers addressing mathematical, logical, computational, philosophical and pragmatic issues related to the four aspects of COIN.

• logics, languages and tools for specifying coordination and norms, implementing or simulating organizations and institutions;
• law of open multi-agent systems: regulatory compliance, penalty and sanctions, dispute resolution and conflict prevention;
• agent societies and communities, social networks, electronic institutions and virtual organizations;
• formal lifecycle models: formation, maintenance, evolution and dissolution of organizations, institutions and normative multi-agent systems;
• formal methods for specifying coordination and organizational structures; models for verification, validation and visualization;
• autonomic institutions and self-organization in multi-agent systems;
• frameworks and protocols for organized and organizational adaptation;
• mechanisms for governance of common pool resources;
• agent environments: physical and institutional resources for physical capability and institutional power;
• discovery, openness and inter-operation in organizations and institutions;
• mixed human-agent coordination and institutions in virtual worlds;
• participatory simulation;
• reports on implemented systems