1st International Workshop “Engineering Multi-Agent Systems” (EMAS 2013)

Although much progress has been made, the design, implementation and deployment of multi-agent systems still poses many challenges. Some of these concern design and software engineering aspects, for example, how to effectively design agents and their interactions? Other challenges concern implementation, for instance, how to effectively implement multi-agent coordination or organisations? Further challenges concern use of logic-based techniques for verification of agent systems.

It is increasingly apparent that there are benefits in considering design and implementation challenges together. For example, design artefacts 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. This unveils a tight interlacement among the different research issues in multi-agent systems engineering.

This naturally results in a workshop that brings together the currently separate topics (but overlapping commu- nities) that focus on software engineering aspects (AOSE), programming aspects (ProMAS), and the application of declarative techniques to design, programming and verification (DALT).

Furthermore, a natural complement to research papers on engineering multi-agent systems is application pa- pers that describe developed applications, and articulate lessons learned and engineering challenges that were identified in building and deploying the applications.

The EMAS workshop thus explicitly pursues three goals:

• To progress and further develop our 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
  the synergies discussed above.
• To provide a venue where people who have developed applications can articulate the lessons learned and
  engineering challenges identified in building and deploying their applications, and have these lessons influ- ence the ongoing research in the field.

The call for papers explicitly addressed both application and research papers that are concerned with any aspect of the engineering of multi-agent systems, specifically including any topics that would fall within the scope of one or more of the three parent workshops:

• Agent-Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE),
• Declarative Agent Languages and Technologies (DALT), 
• Programming Multi-Agent Systems (ProMAS).