ESOA 2003

 Engineering Self-Organising Applications The First International Workshop on
Engineering Self-Organising Applications (ESOA 2003)
to be held at the
Second International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents & Multi-Agent Systems ( AAMAS 2003 ) Melbourne, Australia
in conjunction with the
Tutorial on Engineering Self-Organizing Applications
14th or 15th July 2003
Introduction Related events Topics of interest Submissions Publication Programme Important Dates Programme Committee Organisers

Workshop sponsored by:

Introduction
Self-organising applications (SOAs) take inspiration from biology, the physical world, chemistry, or social systems. Typical examples of SOAs are systems that reproduce socially-based insect behaviour, such as robots or Artificial Life. Furthermore, due to the autonomy of their components, and the locality of their interactions, multi-agent systems also exhibit self-organising behaviour. The global behaviour of these complex systems emerges from the interactions between the different entities or agents that form the whole system. The main characteristic of all these applications is their ability to achieve complex collective tasks with relatively simple individual behaviour, without central control or hierarchy.

The spread of the Internet, mobile communications, and the change of traditional market models, such as in e-commerce, result in the whole information infrastructure operating as a global dynamic system. Therefore, software must adapt to personal requirements, by providing highly customised services to a huge user population. New maintenance requirements have to be met, i.e. software that cannot be stopped must still evolve. In a large interconnected system, this is a task beyond centralised management techniques.

A way to meet these requirements is to utilise the emergent properties of distributed interacting software -- to utilise concepts such as self-organising and self-regulation. However in artificial systems, environmental pressures, local interactions and control may lead to unpredicted or undesirable behaviour. Understanding how to engineer self-organisation is thus central to the development of SOAs on a large scale, and consequently to the development of complex multi-agent systems. From one hand, multi-agent simulations and analytic modelling can be used to study emergent behaviour in real systems. Conversely, results issued from complexity theory can be applied for engineering both multi-agent systems, and self-organising systems.

The goal of this workshop is to open a dialog among practitioners from diverse fields, including: agent based systems, information systems, distributed systems, complex systems, optimisation theory and non-linear systems, neural networks, and evolutionary computation. The workshop will focus on multi-agent systems as self-organising systems, and on new techniques for modelling, shaping, measuring, and maintaining emergent behaviour in large scale distributed software applications. The workshop represents an important opportunity for those active or interested in self-organisation and emergent behaviour research, to hear about current work, discuss future directions and priorities, and form invaluable research contacts.
Related Events
Tutorial on Engineering Self-Organizing Applications , tutorial at AAMAS'03, Melbourne, 2003
Evolutionary Game Theory for Learning in MAS, workshop at AAMAS'03, Melbourne, 2003
Spray Computers: Explorations in Self-Organization for Pervasive Computing , tutorial at PerCom'03, Dallas-Fort Worth, 2003.
Challenges in Open Agent Systems '03 , workshop at AAMAS'03, Melbourne, 2003

Topics of Interest
The main topics of interest include but are not restricted to: Self-organisation in MAS
Self-organising behaviour in multi-agent systems
Emergent behaviour in multi-agent systems
Spontaneous formation of coalitions in multi-agent systems
Coordination mechanisms in self-organising agent communities
Methodologies, Models, Tools
Methodologies for engineering self-organisation
Models, methods and tools for achieving global coherent behaviour
Self-organising theories, methods and algorithms applied to multi-agent systems
Designing complex agent systems
Designing self-organising systems with agents
Formal approaches to handling local/global agent behaviour
New approaches for modelling emergence in agent societies
Self-organising software characterisation frameworks
Self-organising assessment metrics
Approaches to handling scalability and maintenance in emergent computing systems
Performance engineering of emergent computing systems
Game theoretic approaches to emergence in multi-agent systems
Cellular automata approaches to emergence in multi-agent systems
Self-organisation to support multi-agent scalability
Applications/Simulations
Agent-based simulations of self-organising societies
Industrial self-organising applications
Simulations and analytic models of emergent behaviour
Applications of self-organising multi-agent systems to networks, or e-commerce
Self-organisation in business
Emergent information systems
Self-organising networks
Self-organisation in P2P and Grid systems
Autonomic computing systems
Submissions
Papers are solicited for any of the topics of interest listed above. We invite contributions of different kinds. We solicit regular research papers which may report on: completed work; description of current, but mature, work in progress; discussion papers comparing different approaches, or account of practical experiences of using self-organisation in industrial or research applications. The submission should not exceed 10 pages in the ACM conference proceedings style ( http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html ). It must be sent either in PostScript format or in PDF format (submission procedure to be announced)
Publication
All accepted papers (both technical and position papers) will be available on the day of the workshop in a set of working notes. Accepted papers will also made available in electronic format before the day of the workshop.
We subsequently aim to publish a common volume collecting the best papers from this workshop and additional contributions in a volume titled: "Self-Organising Applications: Issues, challenges and trends". The goal is to produce a comprehensive update on today's active research in the field.
Important Dates
Paper submission deadline 31st March 2003 Notification of acceptance 30th April 2003 Camera ready due 15th May 2003 Workshop 14th or 15th July 2003

Location
This Workshop will be held in Melbourne together with the AAMAS 2003 conference.

Programme Committee
Karl Aberer , EPFL, Switzerland
Yaneer Bar-Yam , New England Complex Systems Institute, USA
Rene te Boekhorst , University of Hertfordshire, UK
Sven Brueckner , Altarum, USA
Marco Dorig o , IRIDIA, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium
Noria Foukia, University of Geneva, Switzerland
Nigel Gilbert , University of Surrey, UK
Maria Gini , University of Minnesota, USA
Salima Hassas , University of Lyon, France
Jeff Kephart , IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, USA
Mark Klein , MIT Sloan School of Management, USA
Ghita Kouadri Mostefaoui , University of Fribourg, Switzerland
Soraya Kouadri Mostefaoui , University of Fribourg, Switzerland
Marco Mamei , Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia, Italy
Philippe Massonet , CETIC, Belgium
Evangelos Milios , Dalhousie University, Canada
Radhika Nagpal , MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, MIT, USA
N. C. Narendra , Hewlett-Packard, India
Andrea Omicini , University of Bologna, Italy
H. Van Dyke Parunak , Altarum, USA
Daniel Polani , University of Hertfordshire, UK
David Servat , Laboratoire d'Informatique Appliquée, LIP6, Paris, France
Simon Thompson , BT Exact Technologies, UK
Mihaela Ulieru , University of Calgary, Canada
Chris Van Aart , University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
Tom Wagner , Honeywell Laboratories, USA
David Wolpert , NASA Ames Research Center, USA

Organisers
Enquiries and submissions should be directed to the workshop organisers:
Giovanna Di Marzo Serugendo (main contact)
University of Geneva
Centre Universitaire d'Informatique
24, rue Général-Dufour
CH-1211 Genève 4
Switzerland
Tel: +41 22 705 76 69
Fax: +41 22 705 77 80
Giovanna.Dimarzo@cui.unige.ch
Anthony Karageorgos Emergent Information Systems Group
Department of Computation UMIST Sackville Street, Manchester M60 1QD, UK
Tel: +44 (0)161 2003306
Fax: +44 (0)161 2003324
Anthony.Karageorgos@umist.ac.uk Omer F. Rana Department of Computer Science and Welsh E-Science/Grid Centre
5 The Parade, Cardiff University
PO Box 916
Cardiff CF24 3XF. UK
Tel: +44 (0)2920 875542
Fax: +44 (0)2920 874598
o.f.rana@cs.cf.ac.uk
Franco Zambonelli
University of Modena and Reggio Emilia
Via Allegri 13 - 42100 Reggio Emilia
Italy
Tel: +39 (0)522-406356
Fax: +39 (0)59-2056126
franco.zambonelli@unimo.it

Last modified, January 20th 2003 by webmaster