MATES 2012

The German conference on Multi-Agent system TechnologieS (MATES) provides an interdisciplinary forum for researchers, users (members of business and industry) and developers of intelligent agents and multi-agent systems. The thematic focus of this MATES 2012 is on technologies that enable societies and organisations to be more resilient, inter-connected and collaborative. The conference investigates technologies for truly open distributed systems — covering a wide spectrum of approaches from self-organization and autonomous systems to agreement computing. Advances in research work, as well as prototyped or fielded systems of intelligent agents will be presented and discussed. The conference covers the whole range from theory to application of agent- and multi-agent technologies in order to promote theory and application of agents and multi-agent systems. The conference features an exhibition of practical applications with an advanced concept of agency. Integral part of the technical program will be an exhibition of a variety of tools for the development, and prototypes of all kinds of practical applications of agent and multiagent technology at the conference venue. The conference will also host a doctoral consortium.

For the tenth time the German special interest group on Distributed Artificial Intelligence jointly with the steering committee of MATES organizes this international conference in order to promote theory and application of agents and multi-agent systems. Building on the sequence of agent-related events in Germany in the past such as VDI 1998 (Chemnitz), VertIS 2001 (Bamberg), and KI 2002 (Aachen), the MATES conference series (from 2003 to 2011) now is exclusively devoted to agents and multi-agent systems, and the cross-fertilization between agent theory and application. This year is also the 20th year of the German special inerest group on Distributed Artificial Intelligence - another reason for an inspiring conference on agents! The conference language is English.

Salve - welcome to Trier! The conference takes place in Germany's oldest city - close to Saarbrücken, Frankfurt/Main and Luxemburg as well as the well-known Leibniz Center for Informatics (Schloss Dagstuhl).

The MATES series has been ranked by the Computing Research & Education initiative as a CORE B conference. The proceedings will be published as Springer LNCS.

Agent-based simulation and analysis of social networks • Agents and communities • Adaptive agents and multi-agent learning • Advanced theories of collaboration: Modelling and formation of teams, coalitions, groups, and organizations • Agents and autonomic computing • Agent and multi-agent architectures • Agents and peer-to-peer computing • Agents and pervasive computing • Agents for Ambient Intelligence • Agent-based service discovery, matchmaking, brokering, and composition • Agent communication languages • Agents for e-business and e-government • Agent technologies in the context of service-oriented computing and architectures • Agent to non-agent interoperability • Agents in novel applications • Application of agent-technologies in industrial practice • Artificial social systems: Conventions, norms, institutions; trust and reputation • Autonomous robots and robot teams • Commitment, delegation, responsibility, and obligations in artificial and hybrid societies • Complex systems and their management • Coordination, negotiation, argumentation, and conflict resolution • Deployed agent-based business applications • Hybrid human and agent societies • User modelling and interface agents • Embodied conversational actors and believable agents • Mobile agents • Model-driven design of multi-agent systems • Multi-agent-based simulation • Multi-agent planning and scheduling • Multi-agent platforms and tools • Multi-agent (social) simulation and (cognitive) modelling with agents • Practical aspects of programming agent systems: Robustness, fault tolerance, scalability and performance measurement • Roles and structures, adaptive learning and cognition in organizational models • Semantics of the dynamics of organizational models (Semantic) web services and agents • Standards for agents and multi-agent systems