7th International Workshop on Engineering Multi-Agent Systems (EMAS 2019):Call for Papers

A plain text, shortened version of this CfP is available here for ease of distribution.

About EMAS

A main unifying theme underlying Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning is the idea of an intelligent agent able to reason, act, interact, and learn. This metaphor has stimulated much research in AI and particularly in Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (MAS), giving rise to research in agent-oriented software engineering, programming multi-agent systems, and declarative agent languages and technologies.

EMAS 2019 aims to gather researchers and practitioners working in these areas to present and discuss their research and emerging results in MAS engineering. The overall purpose of this workshop is to facilitate the cross-fertilisation of ideas and experiences in the various fields to:

  1. Enhance knowledge and expertise in MAS engineering and improve the state or-the art;
  2. Define new directions for MAS engineering that are useful to practitioners, relying in results and recommendations coming from different but continuous research areas;
  3. Investigate how practitioners can use or need to adapt established methodologies for the engineering of large-scale and open MAS;
  4. Involve more master and PhD students.

Topics

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Programming frameworks, languages, models and abstractions for all aspects of MAS

  • cognitive models and architectures, such as BDI
  • agent-oriented programming concepts and abstractions
  • patterns and idioms for agent-oriented programming
  • social, organizational and normative aspects
  • agent coordination
  • agent communication, trust, commitments and reputation
  • contracts, negotiation policies
  • mobile agents
  • learning agents
  • applying agent-oriented programming to real-world applications

Formal methods and declarative technologies for specification, verification, and engineering of MAS

  • semantics for multi-agent programming languages
  • modal and epistemic logics for agent modeling
  • game theory and mechanism design for multi-agent systems
  • semantics of agent communication
  • (constraint) logic programming approaches to agent systems
  • distributed constraint satisfaction
  • declarative approaches to engineering agent-based systems
  • high-level executable multi-agent specification languages
  • algorithms for MAS programming (e.g., coordination, cooperation, negotiation)
  • verification of MAS with machine learning components

MAS software engineering methodologies and techniques, and development concerns

  • software architectures for multi-agent systems
  • qualities and tradeoffs of agent-based architectures
  • goal-oriented designreusable design knowledge: patterns and reference architectures
  • modeling languages for agents and MAS
  • testing of agent-based software
  • fault tolerance and load balancing for mobile MAS
  • safety and security for mobile MAS deployment
  • autonomy vs. dependability and robustness
  • security and trust in multi-agent systems

Interoperability and integration

  • interoperability and standards for MAS
  • standardization efforts for multi-agent systems
  • integration of multi-agent and mainstream technologies
  • integration of agents with legacy systems
  • middleware integration of agent-based software
  • implications of introducing agent-based solutions on the development organization

Tools and testbeds

  • benchmarks and testbeds for comparing multi-agent programming languages and tools
  • CASE tools to support agent-oriented software development in practice
  • agent/environment/interaction/organization development tools and platforms
  • generic tools and infrastructures for multi-agent programming
  • coordination infrastructures for multi-agent systems

Using MAS techniques for

  • engineering self-organizing or self-adaptive systems
  • systems of systems engineering
  • service-oriented computing and semantic web
  • multi-agent based simulation
  • social engineering
  • concurrent and distributed systems
  • grid computing
  • pervasive computing
  • cloud and edge computing
  • cyber-physical systems
  • big data applications
  • internet of things

Empirical studies and (industrial) experience reports on engineering MAS applications

  • e-health
  • e-commerce
  • e-learning
  • socio-technical systems
  • social networks
  • (human-)robot systems

Submission Instructions

We solicit four types of submission:

  • Regular papers should (1) clearly describe innovative and original research, or (2) report a survey on a research topic in the field, or (3) explain how existing techniques have been applied to a real-world case. (16 pages (excluding references) in LNCS format).
  • Short papers should describe novel and promising ideas and/or techniques that are in an early stage of development. To that end, short papers will be reviewed under specific review guidelines (8 pages (excluding references) in LNCS format).
  • Doctoral project papers should describe a research effort of an MSc student or the dissertation research of a PhD student in the field of engineering multi-agent systems. The paper should clearly describe the problem tackled, a justification why this problem is important, the research method, the (expected) contributions of the research, and the evaluation. This paper can be co-authored by the student and their supervisor(s) only (6 pages (excluding references) in LNCS format).
  • Tool, testbeds and demo papers should describe a novel tool or demonstration in the field of engineering multi-agent systems. Submission may range from early prototypes to in-house or pre-commercialised products. Authors of other EMAS 2019 papers are also welcomed to submit an accompanying tool/demo paper. The paper should provide a link to supplementary material that allows the reviewers to evaluate the submission such as website or movie link (4 pages (excluding references) in LNCS format).

Submission policy: all papers should be original and not be submitted elsewhere. The review process is single blind: submissions should not be blind, reviewers will be.

The LNCS formatting style is available via: http://www.springer.com/gp/computer-science/lncs/conference-proceedings-guidelines

The Easychair submission page can be found here: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=emas2019. When you enter the title of your paper in the data section in EasyChair, you must add as the first word the category to which the paper has been submitted (this first word does not need to be included in the submitted paper):

  • REGULAR for regular papers (16 pages excluding references)
  • SHORT for short papers (8 pages excluding references)
  • DOCTORAL for doctoral project papers (6 pages excluding references)
  • DEMO for tools, testbeds, and demo papers (4 pages excluding references)

Authors of accepted papers will be invited to submit revised and extended versions of the EMAS papers for inclusion in the post-proceedings that will be published as a volume in Springer's Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence.