SELMAS 2002

 SELMAS2002

1st
International Workshop on Software
Engineering for Large-Scale
Multi-Agent Systems

Sunday, May 19, 2002 *
Orlando, Florida - USA

In
Conjunction with ICSE 2002

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Call
for Papers

Important
Dates

Accepted
Papers

Advance
Program

LNCS
Publication

Program
Comittee

Organizing
Comittee

Contact
Information

Call for Papers
( PDF
Format , Text-Only
Format )

Motivation.

Advances in networking technology have revitalized the investigation of the
agent technology as a promising paradigm to engineer complex distributed
software systems. Objects and agents are abstractions that exhibit points of
similarity, but the development of agent-based software poses other challenges
to software engineering since software agents are inherently more complex
entities. A single agent is driven by beliefs, goals, plans, roles and a number
of behavioral properties such as autonomy, adaptation, interaction,
collaboration, learning and mobility. Each of these features introduces
additional complexity to the system modeling, design and implementation, and
consequently, increases the probability of manifestation of heterogeneous
exceptional situations, security pitfalls and so on. In addition, as the agent
paradigm is devoted to the development of complex distributed systems, a large-scale
multi-agent system encompasses multiple types of agents, each of them having
distinct agency properties, and it needs to satisfy multiple stringent
requirements such as reliability, security, adaptability, interoperability,
scalability, maintainability, and reusability. However,
many existing agent-oriented solutions are far from ideal; in practice, they are
often built in an ad-hoc manner and are error-prone, not generally applicable,
not scalable, and not dynamic.
Current Software Engineering Research.
In this context, research in multi-agent software engineering has been carried
out according two different approaches: (i) agent-based software engineering,
and (ii) object-oriented software engineering for multi-agent systems.
Researchers in the first approach argue persuasively that multi-agent systems
are often much more complex than object-oriented systems and hence the
traditional object model generally fails to capture the complexity of
multi-agent systems. In this approach, agents are a new abstraction that
substitutes the object abstraction realizing the agent abstraction as a new
software engineering paradigm. As a result, proponents of this approach claim it
is necessary to develop new software engineering techniques, methods, and
methodologies that are specifically tailored to agents. On the other hand,
researchers in the second approach propose the integration of agents into the
object-orientation world and, thus, they think of objects and agents as
complementary abstractions. As a result, they have centered on using and
extending existing techniques from object-oriented software engineering, such as
design patterns, frameworks, and modeling languages, to multi-agent software
engineering.

Goals.

The main goal of this workshop is to bring
together researchers and practitioners from both approaches to discuss the current state and future
direction of research in software engineering for large-scale multi-agent
systems. In addition, the workshop is a forum to learn about the latest
research, and also discuss and exchange ideas concerning ongoing work.
Other
particular interests of this workshop are:

determine
the overlap and integration of object-oriented software engineering and
agent-based software engineering,

understand
those issues in the agent technology that difficult and/or improve the
production of large-scale distributed systems, and

provide a
comprehensive overview of existing software engineering techniques that may
successfully be applied to deal
with the complexity associated with realistic multi-agent software

Topics of
Interest.
The workshop is intended to cover wide ranges of topics of
software engineering for large-scale multi-agent systems, from theoretical
foundations to empirical studies. We welcome the submission of papers in all
aspects of agent-multi software engineering, including the following (but are
not limited to):

Comparative studies between
multi-agent systems and object-oriented systems

Pitfalls and lessons learned
in agent-based software construction

Experiments and case studies
with large-scale multi-agent system development

Advanced separation of
concerns in the context of multi-agent systems

Design patterns, design
principles, and architectural styles

Frameworks and software
architectures

Meta-level software
architectures

Coordination
technologies, infrastructures, and tools

Domain-specific languages for
multi-agent systems

Requirements engineering for
multi-agent systems

Software reliability
engineering and multi-agent systems

Testing and fault-tolerance techniques

Practical coordination and
cooperation frameworks

Validation
techniques for agent-based systems

Software development
environments for software agents

Metrics for
multi-agent systems

Multi-agent system modeling

UML application to large-scale
multi-agent systems

Methodologies for
agent-oriented analysis and design

Format
and Submissions. The format
of the workshop will combine short presentations and
focused discussion groups. The number of participants will be between 30 and 40, and it will be
restricted to authors of accepted papers and to a few invited guests. The
submission of papers if followed by a review process by the PC,
with the final decision made by the Workshop Organizers. Prospective participants should submit
electronically a position paper (between 2 and
5 pages) in PDF format to Alessandro Garcia ( afgarcia@inf.puc-rio.br
or afgarcia@teccomm.les.inf.puc-rio.br )
by March 15. The format of submitted papers must follow the ICSE/ACM
conference proceedings guidelines ,
including no page numbers . We encourage authors
to present novel ideas, critique of existing work, and practical studies and
experiments, which demonstrate how software engineering techniques can assist
the development of large-scale multi-agent systems.

Publication of the
Proceedings

Accepted papers
will become part of the Web proceedings of the workshop and be accessible via
the workshop's Web site. An informal
proceedings will be printed and distributed at the workshop. It is the aim of the organizers to publish
revised papers from the workshop in a LNCS volume after the workshop is held.

Organizing Committee

Alessandro
Garcia - Primary Contact

PUC-Rio
– Brazil ( afgarcia@inf.puc-rio.br )

Carlos
Lucena

PUC-Rio
– Brazil (lucena@inf.puc-rio.br)

Jaelson
Castro

Federal
University of Pernambuco – Brazil
( jbc@cin.ufpe.br)

Andrea
Omicini

University of Bologna – Italy (aomicini@deis.unibo.it)

Franco
Zambonelli

University
of Modena and Reggio Emilia – Italy (franco.zambonelli@unimo.it)

Contact Information

Alessandro
Garcia

PUC-Rio
– Brazil ( afgarcia@inf.puc-rio.br )

SoC+Agents
TecComm Group - Software Engineering
Laboratory
Pontifical
Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro - Brazil
URL:
www.teccomm.les.inf.puc-rio.br/SoCAgents

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