ESOA 2006

 ESOA'06 Workshop Important Dates Summary Submissions Publication Organizing Committee Program Committee
The Fourth International Workshop on Engineering Self-Organizing Applications (ESOA'06)
The Fourth International Workshop on Engineering Self-Organizing Applications ( ESOA'06 ) will be held on Tuesday, 09 May 2006, in conjunction with The Fifth International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents & Multiagent Systems ( AAMAS 2006 ) Future University-Hakodate, Japan, May 2006. It will be preceded on Monday, 08 May 2006, by the Tutorial on Engineering Self-Organizing Applications.
Important Dates
Electronic paper submission deadline:
01 Feb 2006 (extended)

Paper notifications:
19 Feb 2006

Camera ready paper:
20 Mar 2006

Workshop date:
09 May 2006

Summary
Today's information infrastructure is a global complex system that consists of great numbers of local interacting components, a system that is so complicated and dynamic that centralized hierarchical control is generally not an option. To be able to competently operate in and fruitfully contribute to this infrastructure, one must engineer systems that are able to adapt to the constant environmental uncertainty and the failure or replacement of its components, without direct human intervention.
An attractive approach to meeting this challenge is to utilize the principle of self-organizing local-to-global emergence. This approach is based on the idea that rich and complex global properties can emerge from purely local interaction between agents. Such systems generate order via self-organization, self-regulation, self-repair and self-maintenance and no global or central organizer is required. However, when designing a system that is based only on local interactions and the emergent properties resulting from these interactions, it is a difficult research problem to characterize the global behavior of the system as a whole. Self organizing applications (SOAs) should be based on such an analysis and understanding.
More specifically: how do we structure the application components and their interactions, so that the self-organization 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 are available, and how effective are they? To address these questions, approaches originating from diverse areas such as non-linear optimization, knowledge-based programming and constraint problem solving are currently being explored. Multi-agent simulations and analytic modeling can be used to study emergent behavior in real systems. On the other hand, results issued from complexity theory can be applied in engineering of both multi-agent systems and self-organizing systems. Furthermore, SOA engineers often take inspiration from biology, chemistry, sociology and the physical world. For example, typical examples of SOAs are systems that reproduce socially-based insect behavior, such as ants-based systems, artificial life, or robots.
The goal of this workshop is to advance the state of the art, investigating the problems mentioned above, and putting a particular emphasis on an interdisciplinary approach. We encourage the communication and cross-fertilization of several fields including: agent-based systems, software engineering, information systems, distributed systems, complex systems, optimization theory and non-linear systems, neural networks, and evolutionary computation.
The ESOA'06 workshop welcomes papers on any specific aspect that may support an engineering approach to self-organizing applications, including:
Foundational papers addressing formal definitions, modeling, specification and analysis of self-organizing and emergent behavior Methodological papers related to the engineering, monitoring and control of software with emergent behavior Middleware infrastructure papers presenting the characteristics and features of software infrastructures to support execution of adaptive components Industrial applications of self-organizing / emergent software Interpretation and discovery of examples of self-organized "engineering" in natural systems. In particular, a non-exhaustive list of topics include:
Models Analytic models of self-organization and emergent behavior Self-organisation theories Bio-inspired process algebra and formal specifications Formal approaches to handling local/global agent behavior Approaches to handling robustness, scalability, efficiency and maintenance in self-organising applications Performance engineering of emergent behavior 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 Emergent programs in actual real-world biological "programs" Socially-inspired interaction mechanisms Specification-based interaction mechanisms Trust-based interaction mechanisms Methodologies, Models, Tools Methodologies for engineering self-organisation Methodologies of decentralized control Methods and algorithms of self-organization 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 behavior 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-organization phenomena observed in real-world systems Comparison of traditional vs. self-organization 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-organized engineering principles evidenced in biological systems. Self-organisation in business Emergent information systems Self-organisation in P2P and Grid systems Self-organising computer and sensor networks Self-assembly
Submissions
Papers must be submitted online at: http://198.108.103.31/esoa06/openconf The submission should not exceed 15 pages in the Springer-Verlag LNCS style, either in PostScript or PDF format. For those submitting papers in PDF format, please ensure that the papers can be viewed by a standard reader. Thus we discourage the use of special character sets.

Publication
All accepted papers will be available on the day of the workshop in a set of working notes. Accepted papers may 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.

Organizing Committee
Daniel Yamins
Harvard University (USA)
yamins (at) fas.harvard.edu Mark Jelasity
University of Bologna (Italy)
jelasity (at) cs.unibo.it Salima Hassas
University of Lyon (France)
hassas (at) liris.cnrs.fr Sven Brueckner
Altarum Institute (USA)
sven.brueckner (at) altarum.org
Program Committee
David Hales, University of Bologna, Italy Sergio Camorlinga University of Manitoba, Canada Vincent Cicirello, Drexel University, USA Giovanna Di Marzo Serugundo, University of Geneva, Switzerland Marco Dorigo, IRIDIA, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium Noria Foukia, University of Otago, New Zealand, USA Maria Gini, University of Minnesota, USA Marie-Pierre Gleizes, IRIT Toulouse, France Manfred Hauswirth, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Switzerland Anthony Karageorgos, University of Thessaly, Greece Manolis Koubarakis, Technical University of Crete, Greece Mark Klein, MIT Sloan School of Management, USA 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 H. Van Dyke Parunak, Altarum, USA 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 Franco Zambonelli, University of Modena e Reggio Emilia, Italy
Please submit questions or comments to the ESOA'06 Organizing Committee at
esoa06 (at) altarum.org