CALL FOR PAPERS
2nd International Workshop on
Software Engineering for Large-Scale
Multi-Agent Systems
(SELMAS 2003)
http://www.teccomm.les.inf.puc-rio.br/selmas2003
International Conference on Software Engineering 2003
http://cs.oregonstate.edu/icse2003/
May 3-4, 2003
Portland, Oregon, USA
Advances in networking technology have revitalized the investigation of the agent technology as a promising paradigm to engineer complex distributed software systems. Nowadays, the agent technology has been applied in a wide range of application domains, including e-commerce, human-computer interfaces, elecommunications, and concurrent engineering. In general, software agents are viewed as complex objects with an attitude. Like objects, agents provide a specific set of services for their users. In fact, objects and agents exhibit points of similarity, but the development of multi-agent systems (MASs) poses other challenges to software engineering since software agents are inherently more complex abstractions. A single agent is driven by beliefs, goals, plans, 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 exceptional situation manifestation, security violations and so on. In addition, as the agent paradigm is devoted to the complex distributed system development, a large-scale MAS 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 scalable, and not generally applicable to large MAS.
In fact, when a huge number of agents interact in an environment, various phenomena occur which are not explicable in terms of the behavior of any single agent. As the world's software agents become more numerous and more highly collaborative, new behaviors appear, making their coordination and management more difficult and increasing the probability of manifestation of heterogeneous exceptional situations, security holes, privacy violations, unexpected global effects, and so on. Moreover, since users and software engineers delegate more autonomy to their MASs, and put more trust in their results, new concerns arise in real-life applications. Commercial success for MAS will require scalable solutions in software engineering approaches in order to enable reuse and effective deployment of large MAS. 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 scalable, not dynamic, and not generally applicable to large-scale MAS. This workshop, aimed to discuss these issues, follows up on the success of the 1st Workshop on Software Engineering for Large-Scale Multi-Agent Systems (SELMAS’02), held in Orlando, USA, May 19, 2002, as part of the ICSE’02.
Goals
The 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 MASs. In addition, the workshop is a forum to learn about the latest research, and also discuss and exchange ideas concerning ongoing work. Particular interests of this workshop are: (i) Determine the overlap and integration of the two general research approaches for multi-agent software engineering; (ii) Understand those issues in the agent technology that difficult and/or improve the production of large-scale distributed systems; (iii) 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.
Scope.
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):
- Software engineering theories for large-scale MAS
- Comparative studies between multi-agent systems and object-oriented systems
- Pitfalls and learned lessons in the construction of large MAS
- Experiments and case studies with large-scale MAS development
- Advanced separation of concerns in the context of MAS
- Design patterns, design principles, and architectural styles
- Frameworks and software architectures
- Reflective software architectures
- Coordination architectures, infrastructures, and tools
- Domain-specific languages for MAS
- Requirements engineering for MAS
- Software reliability engineering and MAS
- Exception handling and fault-tolerance techniques
- Mobility and security issues in large MAS
- Software engineering techniques for resource-bounded MAS
- MAS development and pervasive computing
- Verification and validation techniques for MAS
- Software development environments for real-life MAS
- Modeling of large MAS
- UML application to large-scale MAS
- Methodologies for agent-oriented analysis and design
- Testing and metrics for MAS
How to Submit.
Format and Submissions. The format of the workshop will combine short presentations and focused discussion groups. The number of participants will be between 40 and 50, and it will be restricted to authors of accepted papers and to a few invited guests. Prospective participants should submit electronically a position paper (between 5 and 8 pages) in PDF format via the web site http://icse2003-submissions.ira.uka.de:8080/selmas-papers/submit/ by February 15, 2003. The format of submitted papers must follow the ICSE/ACM conference proceedings guidelines(http://cs.oregonstate.edu/icse2003/), 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.
Submission Due Dates.
* Submission Date: February 1, 2003 (NOW: February 15, 2003)
* Accceptance/rejection: March 1, 2003
* Camera-ready Copy: April 1, 2003
Review Process.
The submission of papers will be followed by a review process by the PC, with the final decision made by the Workshop Organizers.
Organizing Committee.
Jose Alberto R. P. Sardinha - Primary Contact
PUC-Rio - Brazil (sardinha@inf.puc-rio.br)
Alessandro Garcia
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)
Alexander Romanovsky
University of Newcastle upon Tyne - UK (alexander.romanovsky@ncl.ac.uk)
Paulo Alencar
University of Waterloo - Canada(palencar@csg.uwaterloo.ca)
Donald Cowan
University of Waterloo - Canada(dcowan@csg.uwaterloo.ca)
Program Committee.
Alessandro Garcia (PUC-Rio, Brazil)
Alexander Romanovsky (University of Newcastle upon Tyne - UK)
Anand Tripathi (University of Minnesota - USA)
Andrea Omicini (University of Bologna – Italy)
Andrés Díaz Pace (UNCPBA University, Argentina)
Anna Perini (Istituto per la Ricerca Scientifica e Tecnologica, Italy)
Awais Rashid (Lancaster University - UK)
Brian Henderson-Sellers (University of Technology, Sydeney, Australia)
Bruno Schulze (LNCC, Brazil)
Carlos Angel Iglesias Fernandez (Politechnical University of Madrid - Spain)
Carlos Lucena (PUC-Rio, Brazil)
Catholijn Jonker (Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam)
Cecilia Rubira (UNICAMP - Brazil)
Dan Marinescu (Central Florida University - USA)
Donald Cowan (University of Waterloo - Canada)
Eric Yu (University of Toronto - Canada)
Evandro de Barros Costa (UFAL-Brazil)
Federico Bergenti (Universita` degli Studi di Parma, Italy)
Franco Zambonelli (University of Modena and Reggio Emilia – Italy)
Gerd Wagner (Eindhonven University of Technology - The Netherlands)
Gerhard Weiss (Technical University of Munich - Germany)
Gustavo Rossi (Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Argentina)
Jaelson Castro (Universidade Federal de Pernambuco - Brazil)
Jean-Pierre Briot (Centre national de la recherche scientifique, France)
John Debenham (University of Technology, Sydeney, Australia)
José Alberto R. P. Sardinha (PUC-Rio, Brazil)
José Carlos Maldonado (USP, Brazil)
Juergen Lind (AgentLab, Germany)
Julio Leite (PUC-Rio - Brazil)
Katia Sycara (Carnegie Mellon University - USA)
Liz Kendall (Monash University - Australia)
Luiz Cysneiros (York University, Canada)
Marco Mamei (University of Modena & Reggio Emilia - Italy)
Marcus Fontoura (IBM Almaden Research Center - USA)
Marie-Pierre Gervais (Le Laboratoire d'Informatique de Paris, France)
Marie-Pierre Gleizes (Universite paul Sabatier, Toulouse)
Markus Endler (PUC-Rio, Brazil)
Martin Fredriksson (Blekinge Institute of Technology - Sweden)
Martin Griss (University of California, Santa Cruz - USA)
Michael Huhns (University of South Carolina)
Michael Stal (Siemens)
Michael Weiss (Carleton University)
Olivier Gutknecht (France)
Paolo Giorgini (University of Trento)
Paulo Alencar (University of Waterloo - Canada)
Robert Kessler (University of Utah)
Rogério de Lemos (The University of Kent, UK)
Ruy Milidiu (PUC-Rio - Brazil)
Tom Holvoet (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium)
Tom Maibaum (King's College London, UK)
Van Parunak (Altarum Institute - USA)
Walt Truszkowski (NASA - USA)
Yannis Labrou (Fujitsu Laboratories of America, Inc.)
