Over the past three decades, software engineers have derived a progressively better understanding of the characteristics of complexity in software. It is now widely recognised that *interaction* is probably the most important single characteristic of complex software. Software architectures that contain many dynamically interacting components, each with their own thread of control, and engaging in complex coordination protocols, are typically orders of magnitude more complex to correctly and efficiently engineer than those that simply compute a function of some input through a single thread of control.
Unfortunately, it turns out that many (if not most) real-world applications have precisely these characteristics. As a consequence, a major research topic in computer science over at least the past two decades has been the development of tools and techniques to model, understand, and implement systems in which interaction is the norm. Indeed, many researchers now believe that in future, computation itself will be understood as chiefly as a process of interaction.
Since the 1980s, software agents and multi-agent systems have grown into what is now one of the most active areas of research and development activity in computing generally. There are many reasons for the current intensity of interest, but certainly one of the most important is that the concept of an agent as an autonomous system, capable of interacting with other agents in order to satisy its design objectives, is a natural one for software designers. Just as we can understand many systems as being composed of essentially passive objects, which have state, and upon which we can perform operations, so we can understand many others as being made up of interacting, semi-autonomous agents.
This recognition has led to the growth of interest in agents as a new paradigm for software engineering. In this workshop we will seek to examine the credentials of agent-based approaches as a software engineering paradigm, and to gain an insight into what agent-oriented software engineering will look like.
The AOSE-2001 workshop will build on the success of the AOSE-2000 workshop, held at the ICSE2000 conference in Limerick, Ireland, in June 2000. The proceedings of AOSE-2000 were formally published under the title "Agent-Oriented Software Engineering" by Springer-Verlag, and there are similar plans for AOSE-2001.
We welcome the submission of all papers on aspects of agent oriented software engineering, but particularly the following:
Relevance will be a key consideration in determining acceptance or otherwise. Papers should clearly address software engineering concerns of agent-based systems. Papers that simply describe an application of agents, or that address general agent issues without focussing themselves on AOSE concerns will be rejected.
Those wishing to participate in the workshop should submit an original research paper of up to 5000 words (approximately 8 pages maximum in the correctly formatted form) to the workshop chair, to arrive no later than 19 March 2001. Electronic submission in PostScript or PDF is mandatory. The first page should include the full name and contact details (including email, full postal address, and telephone number) of at least one author.
Submissions due Monday 19 March 2001 Notifications sent Monday 16 April 2001 Workshop Tuesday 29 May 2001
Michael Wooldridge (chair) University of Liverpool, UK email M.J.Wooldridge@csc.liv.ac.uk Paolo Ciancarini (co-chair) University of Bologna, Italy email ciancarini@cs.unibo.it Gerhard Weiss (co-chair) Technical University of Munich, Germany email weissg@informatik.tu-muenchen.de