COIN@AAMAS 2006

Multi-agent systems are often understood as complex entities where a multitude of agents interact, usually with some intended individual or collective purpose. Such a view usually assumes some form of structure, or set of norms or conventions that articulate or restrain interactions in order to make them more effective in attaining those goals, more certain for participants or more predictable. The engineering of effective coordination or regulatory mechanisms is a key problem for the design of open complex multi-agent systems.In recent years, social and organizational aspects of agency have become a major issue in MAS research. Recent applications of MAS on Web Services, Grid Computing and Ubiquitous Computing enforce the need for using these aspects in order to ensure social order within these environments. Openness, heterogeneity, and scalability of MAS pose new demands on traditional MAS interaction models. Therefore, the view of coordination and control has to be expanded to consider not only an agent-centric perspective but societal and organization-centric views as well.

The overall problem of analyzing the social, legal, economic and technological dimensions of agent organizations, and the co-evolution of agent interactions, provide theoretically demanding and interdisciplinary research questions at different levels of abstraction. Consequently, this workshop provides a space for the convergence of concerns and developments from MAS researchers that have been involved with these issues from the complementary perspectives of coordination, organizations, institutions and norms.

The COIN workshop is a continuation of the ANIREM and OOOP workshops held in AAMAS’05. A twin event of COIN – focused, then, on organizational aspects of agent interactions – is expected to be collocated with ECAI'06.

The COIN workshop in AAMAS’06 will focus on the normative or prescriptive aspects involved in agent coordination.

Topics of interest include:
•  Ontologies, methodologies, tools and standards for regulated MAS  •  Social science background for regulated MAS: Roles, authority, motivation, social power and other social relationships and attitudes  •  Languages for norms: expressiveness vs efficiency  •  Electronic institutions and virtual organizations  •  Coordination and interaction conventions, technologies and artifacts  •  Institutional aspects of peer to peer interaction  •  Issues in regulatory dynamics (creation, evolution, change, disappearance)  •  Issues in regulated MAS implementatio  •  Examples of significant regulated environment  •  Simulation, analysis and verification of regulated MAS

We particularly encourage authors to submit innovative and original papers that report on
•  Formal and theoretical model  •  Software frameworks, tools, and methodologie  •  Applications, case studies, and experimental work