SELMAS 2004

With the advances in Internet technologies, multi-agent systems (MASs) are undergoing a transition from closed monolithic architectures into open architectures composed of a huge number of autonomous agents, which operate and move across different environments. Large-scale open systems involve hundreds or perhaps thousands of agents not necessarily co-designed to share a common goal. As multiple software agents become highly collaborative and operate in networked environments, they must be context-aware and deal with environment uncertainty. It makes their coordination and management more difficult and increases the likelihood of the occurrence of exceptional situations, such as security holes, privacy violations, and unexpected global effects. The goal of the 3rd edition of SELMAS is to bring together researchers and practitioners to discuss the current state and future direction of research in software engineering for open MASs.

The workshop is intended to cover a wide range of topics of software engineering for large-scale multi-agent systems, from theoretical foundations to empirical studies, including the following (but not limited to):

• Advanced separation of concerns in the context of MAS
• Comparative studies between multi-agent systems and object-oriented systems
• Coordination architectures, infrastructures, and tools
• Design patterns, design principles, and architectural styles
• Dependability in open MAS
• Domain-specific languages for MAS
• Exception handling and fault-tolerance techniques
• Experiments and case studies with large-scale MAS development
• Frameworks and software architectures
• MAS development and pervasive computing
• Methodologies for agent-oriented analysis and design
• Mobility and security issues in large MAS
• Modeling of large MAS
• Pitfalls and learned lessons in the construction of large MAS
• Reflective software architectures
• Requirements engineering for MAS
• Software development environments for real-life MAS
• Software engineering techniques for resource-bounded MAS
• Software engineering theories for large-scale MAS
• Software reliability engineering and MAS
• Testing and metrics for MAS
• Verification and validation techniques for MAS
• UML application to large-scale MAS