3rd International Workshop “Environments for Multi-Agent Systems” (E4MAS 2006)

The successful E4MAS workshops at AAMAS 2004 in New York and AAMAS 2005 in Utrecht have put the environment on the research agenda of the multiagent systems community. As a result, the environment is now a focus of research in its own right. Research on environments recognizes the environment as a first-order abstraction in multiagent systems with a dual role: (1) the environment provides the surrounding conditions for agents to exist (which implies that the environment is an essential part of every multiagent system), and (2) the environment provides an exploitable design abstraction to build multiagent system applications. As such, the environment becomes a building block for multiagent systems that engineers can use creatively in the design of a multiagent system. Distinguishing clearly between the responsibilities of both agent and the environment supports separation of concerns in multiagent systems and helps to manage the huge complexity of engineering real-world applications.

The results obtained from three years research on environments in multiagent systems have been communicated to the broader research community in various ways. The post-proceedings of the first and second edition of the E4MAS workshop were published by Springer in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series as Vol. 3374 and Vol. 3830. Two meetings of the AgentLink III Technical Forum Group on Environments— Ljubljana, February 2005 and Budapest, September 2005—resulted in a number of publications for a Special Issue of Informatica devoted on Hot Topics in European Agent Research. In addition, a Special Issue of the Journal on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems is in preparation that aims to make a round-up of research on environments and outline venues for future research in the domain.

The main objective of E4MAS 2006 is to make a step forward in environment engineering. These workshop notes bundle the papers accepted for the third E4MAS workshop. The papers discuss various aspects of environment engineering, ranging from conceptual models to architecture and frameworks for building environments. We are convinced that the material presented in the papers provides a rich source of inspiration for the discussions at the workshop.

We thank the members of the program committee for their reviews and thank all authors for submitting their work to E4MAS 2006. All submitted papers were blind reviewed by three reviewers. From the 11 submissions we received for the workshop, 7 submissions were accepted as full paper and 2 submissions were accepted as short paper.