ESOA'05 Workshop
The Third International Workshop on
Engineering
Self-Organising Applications (ESOA'05)
to be held at the
Fourth International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents
and
Multi-Agent Systems (
AAMAS'05
), July 25th or
26th, 2005 - Utrecht, The Netherlands
in
conjuction with the
Tutorial
on Engineering Self-Organizing Applications
Introduction
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, for example software that cannot be
stopped must evolve to meet changing requirements. In a large
interconnected system this is a task beyond centralised management
techniques. At the other end of the scale, ad-hoc sensors networks and
MEMs devices are making it possible to embed millions of smart
computing agents into the environment. Here too we need the system to
be able to adapt to constant failures and replacement of agents and
changes in the environment, without human intervention.
A way to meet these requirements is to utilise the emergent properties
of distributed interacting software -- to utilise concepts such as
self-organisation, self-regulation, self-repair and self-maintenance.
However, in artificial systems, environmental pressures and local
interactions and control may lead to unpredicted or undesirable
behaviour. Understanding how to engineer the correct self-organisation
behaviour is thus an issue of major concern.
Self-organising applications (SOAs) are able to dynamically change
their functionality and structure without direct user intervention to
meet changes in requirements and their environment. The overall
functionality delivered by SOAs typically changes progressively, mainly
in a non-linear fashion, until it reaches (emerges to) a state where it
satisfies the system requirements at the time and therefore it is
termed self-organising or emergent behaviour. Self-organising behaviour
is often the result of the execution of a number of individual
application components that locally interact with each other aiming to
achieve their local goals, for example, systems that are based on
agents or distributed objects. The main characteristic of such systems
is their ability to achieve complex collective tasks with relatively
simple individual behaviours, without central or hierarchical control.
A major open issue is therefore how to engineer desirable emergent
behaviour in SOAs and how to avoid undesirable ones given the
requirements and the application environment. To address this issue,
approaches originating from diverse areas such as non-linear
optimisation, knowledge-based programming and constraint problem
solving are currently been explored. Furthermore, SOA engineers often
take inspiration from the real world, for example from biology,
chemistry, sociology and the physical world. For example, typical
examples of SOAs are systems that reproduce socially-based insect
behaviour, such as ants-based systems, artificial life, or robots.
Although the results achieved so far are promising, further work
is required until the problem is sufficiently addressed.
More specific fundamental questions that need an answer are: How do we
structure the application components and their interactions, so that
the self-organisation process results in the desired functionality? How
do we validate that the application performs to the requirements within
the range of scenarios expected during deployment? What means of
influencing the dynamics of the application do we have available and
how effective are they? On the one hand, multi-agent simulations and
analytic modelling can be used to study emergent behaviour in real
systems. On the other hand, results issued from complexity theory
can be applied in engineering of 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, software engineering,
information systems, distributed systems, complex systems, optimisation
theory and non-linear systems, neural networks, and evolutionary
computation.
The ESOA series workshop has been running since 2003. The
ESOA'03
workshop has
seen great interest in applying nature-inspired models to fields as
diverse as network security, manufacturing control, and electronic
markets.
ESOA'04
workshop papers discussed self-assembly of software, robots task
allocations, design methods, and stigmergy based applications. Both
workshops were held during the AAMAS conference, and post-proceedings
are published by Springer-Verlag.
The ESOA'05 workshop welcomes papers on any specific aspect that may
support an engineered approach to self-organising applications, there
included:
Foundational papers addressing formal definitions, modelling,
specification and verification of self-organising and emergent
behaviour
Methodological papers related to the engineering, monitoring and
control of software with emergent behaviour
Middleware infrastructure papers presenting the characteristic
and features of software infrastructures to support execution of
adaptive components
Industrial applications of self-organising / emergent software
Topics of Interest
The main topics of interest include but are not restricted to:
- Models
Analytic models of self-organisation and emergent behaviour
Self-organisation theories
Bio-inspired process algebra and formal specifications
Formal approaches to handling local/global agent behaviour
Approaches to handling robustness, scalability, efficiency and
maintenance in self-organising applications
Performance engineering of emergent behaviour in multi
agent-based 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
- Interaction Mechanisms
Nature-inspired interaction mechanisms
Socially-inspired interaction mechanisms
Specification-based interaction mechanisms
Trust-based interaction mechanisms
- Methodologies, Models, Tools
Methodologies for engineering self-organisation
Methodologies of decentralised control
Methods and algorithms of self-organisation in multi-agent systems
Design of agent-based self-organising systems
Design of high-level goals and local interactions
Self-organising software characterisation frameworks
Self-organising assessment metrics
Performance engineering of emergent behaviour in multi
agent-based systems
Self-organising software architectures
- Middleware technology
Supporting nature-inspired coordination
Supporting socially-inspired techniques
Run-time environment for self-organising agents
- Experiences
Reports on simulation experiences
Reports on self-organisation phenomena observed in real-world
systems
Comparison of traditional vs. self-organisation approaches
Challenges and roadmap reports
- Applications
Self-organising multi-agent based applications
Industrial self-organising applications
Self-organisation in manufacturing systems and supply chain
management
Self-organisation in business
Emergent information systems
Self-organisation in P2P and Grid systems
Self-organising computer and sensor networks
Self-assembly
Submissions
The submission should not exceed 15 pages in the Springer-Verlag LNCS
style (
http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html
).
It must be sent either in PostScript or PDF format to
esoa05 at cui.unige.ch.
For
those submitting
papers in PDF format, please ensure that papers do not contain embedded
fonts (such as embedded Asian fonts). These papers can be difficult to
read
and view with many PDF viewers not equipped to display certain
character sets.
Publication
All accepted papers will be available on the day of the workshop in a
set of working notes. Accepted papers will also be 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, which will be published by
Springer-Verlag.
Important Dates
Paper submission
deadline:
March 14, 2005
Notification of
acceptance:
April 18, 2005
Camera ready due:
May 9, 2005
Workshop:
July 25 or 26, 2005
Organising Committee
Sven Brueckner, Altarum Institute, USA
http://www.erim.org/~sbrueckner/
Sven.Brueckner at
altarum.org
Giovanna Di Marzo Serugendo, University of Geneva, Switzerland
http://cui.unige.ch/~dimarzo
Giovanna.Dimarzo at
cui.unige.ch
David Hales, University of Bologna, Italy
http://www.davidhales.com
dave at davidhales.com
Franco Zambonelli, Universita' di Modena e Reggio Emilia, Italy
http://www.dismi.unimo.it/Zambonelli/
franco.zambonelli at
unimore.it
Steering Committee
H. Van Dyke Parunak, Altarum Institute, USA
Omer F. Rana, University of Cardiff, UK
Anthony Karageorgos, University of Thessaly, Greece
Radhika Nagpal, Harvard University, USA
Program Committee
Yaneer Bar-Yam, New England Complex Systems Institute, USA
Sergio Camorlinga University of Manitoba, Canada
Vincent Cicirello, Drexel University, USA
Marco Dorigo, IRIDIA, Université Libre de
Bruxelles, Belgium
Noria Foukia, University of Southern California, USA
Maria Gini, University of Minnesota, USA
Marie-Pierre Gleizes, IRIT Toulouse, France
Salima Hassas, University of Lyon, France
Manfred Hauswirth, Swiss Federal Institute of
Technology, Switzerland
Mark Jelasity, University of Bologna, Italy
Margaret Jefferies, The University of Waikato, New
Zealand
Manolis Koubarakis, Technical University of Crete,
Greece
Mark Klein, MIT Sloan School of Management, USA
Ghita Kouadri Mostefaoui, University of Fribourg,
Switzerland
Soraya Kouadri Mostefaoui, University of Fribourg,
Switzerland
Marco Mamei, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia,
Italy
Paul Marrow, BT, UK
Philippe Massonet, CETIC, Belgium
Alberto Montresor, University of Bologna, Italy
Andrea Omicini, University of Bologna, Italy
Daniel Polani, University of Hertfordshire, UK
Martin Purvis, University of Otago, New Zealand
Mikhail Smirnov, Fraunhofer Fokus, Berlin, Germany
Paul Valckenaers, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven,
Belgium
