[Swarm-Modelling] CFP: Engineering Environment-Mediated Multiagent Systems

[Steve Railsback]

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                   C A L L  F O R  P A P E R S

   Engineering Environment-Mediated Multiagent Systems EEMMAS 2007
                    Springer LNCS Proceedings
        Selected and Revised Papers will be Published in a
Special Issue of ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems

           Invited speakers: Marco Dorigo and Juan Pavon
        
                 Satellite Conference of ECCS 2007
           The European Conference on Complex Systems
               Dresden, Germany, October 1-5, 2007

      http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~distrinet/events/eemmas/2007/
                        address@hidden



IMPORTANT DATES

Paper submission deadline: May 31, 2007
Paper notifications: June 30, 2007
Camera ready paper: July 31, 2007
Conference: October 1-5, 2007

SCOPE

The field of multiagent systems (MAS) studies the foundations and
engineering of systems that consists of a network of autonomous
entities (agents) that are situated in an environment. Due to the
decentralization of control in MAS (each agent is a locus of control
in the system) interaction is essential to enable agents to
achieve the system goals. Besides exchanging messages, agents can
interact indirectly by manipulating marks in the environment.
Classical examples are digital pheromones that represent paths to
relevant information and gradient-fields that reflect dynamical
structures in a network. In such environment-mediated MAS, the
environment provides a coordination infrastructure that enables
agents to share information and coordinate their behavior.

To build environment-mediated MAS, a disciplined engineering approach
is necessary. Self-organization is an approach to engineer
decentralized, distributed and resource-limited systems that are
capable of dynamically adapting to changing conditions without
external intervention. This useful system property is often reflected
in functions such as self-configuration, self-optimization, and
self-healing. Engineering approaches to self-organizing systems
often rely on global functionality to emerge from local and
autonomous decisions of individual actors based on local information
typically communicated through a shared environment.

Although we have some initial understanding how to engineer such
systems, many research issues are still open. When designing a
system that is based only on local interactions in the environment
and the emergent properties resulting from these interactions, it is
a difficult research problem on the one hand to obtain the required
global behavior of the system and on the other hand to avoid
undesired global properties. Environment engineering as well as the
exploitation of emergent behavior in system design is still in its
infancy, especially in complex distributed problem settings.


OBJECTIVES

The general objective of EEMMAS is to advance state of the art
theory and engineering of environment-mediated multiagent systems.
As such EEMMAS aims to establish a synergetic collaboration between
two research communities: Environments for Multiagent Systems
(E4MAS http://www.cs.kuleuven.ac.be/~distrinet/events/e4mas/) and
Engineering Self-Organizing Applications
(ESOA http://www.springerlink.com/content/3-540-33342-8/).
The event will be run in a highly interactive style with
presentations and discussion sessions. Marco Dorigo and Juan Pavon
both will give an invited talk at the event.


TOPICS

Research topics include but are not restricted to:

Foundation
- Application of principles from domains related to complex system
  such as physics, biology, and economics to environment-mediated
  MAS
- Mechanisms for self-organizing and emergent properties for
  environment-mediated MAS
- Theories and models of environment-mediated MAS

Engineering
- Requirements analysis and software architectures of environment-
  mediated MAS
- Reusable design approaches for self-organizing and emergent
  properties
- Methodological support for the design and implementation of
  environment-mediated MAS
- Middleware and frameworks for environment-mediated MAS
- Assessment metrics and performance evaluation

Experience Reports and Applications
- Prototypical examples of environment-mediated MAS applications
- Practical applications of distributed environment-mediated MAS


PAPERS

EEMMAS welcomes the submission of orignal theoretical, experimental,
methodological as well as application papers. Papers may report
on completed work, descriptions of work in progress or discussion
papers.

Submitted papers will be evaluated by three members of the PC.
Papers that present a valuable idea that needs further development
can be accepted as a short paper. The submission should be 12-16
pages in length, including figures and references. The paper must
be formatted according to the Springer Verlag LNCS style in A4
format.

Papers should be submitted in pdf format to address@hidden


PUBLICATIONS

The proceedings of EEMMAS will be published as a volume in the
Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in Computer Science series.

Selected and Revised papers will be published in a special issue
of the ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems
(TAAS: http://www.acm.org/pubs/taas/).


CONTACT

address@hidden


ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

- Danny Weyns, DistriNet Labs, K.U.Leuven, Belgium
- Sven Brueckner, NewVectors LLC, USA
- Yves Demazeau, LIG, Grenoble, France

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

- Flavien Balbo, LAMSADE, Universite Paris-Dauphine, France
- Tibor Bosse, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands
- Cristiano Castelfrachi, ISTC-CNR, Rome, Italy
- Giovanna Di Marzo Serugendo, University of London, UK
- Marco Dorigo, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium
- Alexis Drogoul, IRD/IFI/MSI, Hanoi, Vietnam
- Jacques Ferber, Université de Montpellier II, Lirmm, France
- Marie-Pierre Gleizes, IRIT Toulouse, France
- David Hales, University of Bologna, Italy
- Tom Holvoet, DistriNet, K.U.Leuven, Belgium
- Mark Jelasity, Hung. Acad. Sci. and University of Szeged, Hungary
- Jeffrey Kephart, IBM, USA
- Franziska Kluegl, University of Wurzburg, Germany
- Marco Mamei, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy
- Fabien Michel, LERI, Reims, France
- James Odell (TBC), Intelligent Automation, Inc., Ann Arbor, USA
- Andrea Omicini, Università di Bologna, Italy
- Juan Pavón Mestras, Universidad Complutense Madrid, Spain
- H. Van Dyke Parunak, NewVectors LLC, Ann Arbor, USA
- Alessandro Ricci, Università di Bologna, Italy
- Nicolas Sabouret, LIP6 Paris, France
- John Sauter, NewVectors LLC, Ann Arbor, USA
- Guy Théraulaz, Universite Paul Sabatier, Toulouse, France
- Karl Tuyls, University of Maastricht, The Netherlands
- Adelinde Uhrmacher, University of Rostock, Germany
- Paul Valckenaers, PMA, K.U.Leuven, Belgium
- Mirko Viroli, Università di Bologna, Italy
- Daniel Yamins, Harvard University, USA
- Franco Zambonelli, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy

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