SELMAS 2002

The development of multi-agent systems 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 complex distributed system development, 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. The main goal of this workshop is to bring together
researchers and practitioners to discuss the current state and future direction of research in software engineering for large-scale multi-agent systems. 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 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.

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 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. We welcome the submission of papers in all aspects of agent-multi software engineering, including (but are not restrict to) the following:

• Comparative studies between multi-agent and OO systems
• Lessons learned in agent-based software construction
• Experiments and case studies
• Advanced separation of concerns
• Design patterns, design principles, and architectural styles
• Frameworks and software architectures
• Meta-level software architectures
• Coordination technologies, infrastructures, and tools
• Domain-specific languages
• Requirements engineering
• Software reliability engineering
• Fault-tolerance techniques
• Practical coordination and cooperation frameworks
• Software testing, verification and validation techniques
• Software development environments
• Analysis and design methodologies
• System modeling and metrics
• UML application