EMAS 2014

The engineering of multi-agent systems (MAS) is a complex activity, for these systems consist of multiple autonomous and heterogeneous agents, and the system's proper functioning depends on the effective interaction of these agents. MAS have been used to a certain extent in the industry, but a wider adoption is hindered by the fact that the engineering techniques for building them are not as mature as mainstream software engineering techniques. Numerous challenges have to be addressed, including:
- Design and software engineering; for example, how to effectively design agents and their interactions?
- Implementation; how to effectively implement multi-agent coordination or organizations?
- Verification; how to formally verify (un)desired properties of individual agents and MAS?

It is manifest that these challenges can be tackled more effectively when considered together within the overarching discipline of MAS engineering. For example, design artefacts (e.g., agent or MAS models) can be used to support and assist with debugging and testing. Another example is the development of agent-oriented programming languages that result in programs that are more readily verifiable. A final example is the use of declarative techniques that span design and implementation.

The International Workshop on Engineering Multi-Agent Systems (EMAS) is the ideal venue for papers that relate to all aspects of agent and MAS engineering. EMAS was created in 2013 as a merger of three separate workshops (with overlapping communities) that focus on software engineering aspects (AOSE), programming aspects (ProMAS), and the application of declarative techniques to design, programming and verification (DALT). The EMAS community welcomes application papers that describe lessons learned and engineering challenges identified in building and deploying multi-agent systems.

The EMAS workshop explicitly pursues three goals:
- To progress and further develop the understanding of how to engineer multi-agent systems.
- To bring together the communities that are concerned with different aspects of engineering multi-agent systems, and by doing so, allow for better interchange of ideas between the communities, thus exploiting synergies discussed above.
- To attract workshop papers that report on experiences and lessons learned from innovative applications of MAS.

We thus call for research papers that are concerned with any aspect of the engineering of multi-agent systems. The list of topics includes but is not limited to the topics of the three parent workshops.

• Agent-Oriented Software Engineering
• Declarative Agent Languages and Technologies
• Programming Multi-Agent Systems