Call for Papers
                   7th International Workshop on  
       Agent-based Computing for Enterprise Collaboration (ACEC)
                Agent-Oriented Workflows and Services
                        at IEEE WETICE 2009

                 Date: June 29 - July 1, 2009
              Location: Groningen (The Netherlands) 

                 http://wetice.org/workshops.php


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Important Dates

Deadline for Papers:            February 20, 2009
Notification of Acceptance:     March 13, 2009
Full version of accepted
papers due to IEEE:             April 10, 2009
WETICE-2009:                    June 29 - July 1, 2009

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                         OVERVIEW

The autonomy and intelligence of software agents have greatly enhanced
automation in many operational domains. A major benefit of using agents
is the ability to assist in the collaboration among humans and software
mechanisms, alike. Agent-enacted collaboration can be extremely helpful
in areas such as Computer Supported Collaborative Work, Workflow and
Supply Chain Management, Automation in Virtual Enterprises, and
Automated Distributed Component Composition.

This year the Agent-based Computing for Enterprise Collaboration (ACEC)
workshop will concentrate on two main themes: 
* Agent-based Services 
* Agent-based Solutions for Dynamic Collaborations 

These two themes represent important areas where software agents can
leverage their distributed nature along with their proactive and
autonomous characteristics to provide solutions for complex problems
which are difficult to address using traditional/existing technologies.

With the popularity and pervasiveness of services in the emerging
digital world, enterprises must carefully evaluate how to make their
services openly accessible. Furthermore, it is important for enterprises
to learn how to exploit the services of others while taking into account
the unexpected circumstances and changing scenarios, which frequently
occur in business ecosystems. 

In both of these (above given) contexts, software agents can play an
important role. 
In this respect, ACEC 2009 intends to bring together researchers and
practitioners to discuss the key issues, approaches, open problems,
innovative applications, and trends in this research area. We
enthusiastically solicit papers that address agent mediation and
management of services and/or products of on-line businesses. 

                             TOPICS
Topics of interests include but are not limited to:

* Agent-mediated workflow, supply chain, or virtual enterprises 
* Methodologies, languages and tools to support agent collaboration 
* Agent architectures and infrastructures for dynamic collaboration 
* Agent-based service architectures and infrastructures 
* Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) based on agents 
* Services for dynamic agent collaboration 
* Agent-to-Human service interactions 
* Agent-mediated service integration 

INVITED SPEAKER:        Dr Klaus Fischer from DFKI

"Using Agents to Support Interoperability of Business Applications".

Dr Fischer has lead DFKI's participation in three trend-setting EC
projects (ATHENA, SHAPE and COIN). This presentation build on these to
offer further insights into the role of agents for interoperability
services for distributed collaborative enterprises. 

                             SUBMISSION of PAPERS

Papers should contain original contributions not published or submitted
elsewhere, and references to related state-of-theart work. Authors of
accepted papers are expected to present their papers at the workshop.
Papers up to six pages (including figures, tables and references) can be
submitted. Papers should follow the IEEE format, which is singlespaced,
two columns, 10pt Times/Roman font. Papers should include a title, the
name and affiliation of each author, an abstract of up to 150 words and
no more than eight keywords. Please submit papers, in PDF or PS format,
to Acec09@mbs.ac.uk by February 20th, 2009. All submitted papers will be
peer-reviewed by a minimum of three program committee members. The
accepted papers and the summary report produced by each group will be
published in the post-conference proceedings (to be published by the
IEEE Computer Society Press). 

If you have further questions or remarks, please do not hesitate to
contact the workshop organizers. 


                       WORKSHOP ORGANISATION

Organisers for ACEC'2009 are: 

* Usman Wajid
* Cesar A. Marin
Manchester Business School,
The University of Manchester. UK 

E-mail: acec09 at mbs.ac.uk

Steering Committee:
* Federico Bergenti
* M. Brian Blake
* Giacomo Cabri


Programme Committee (confirmed so far):

* Ramon Brena Tecnologico de Monterrey , Mexico
* Habin Lee Brunel University London, UK
* Jorg P. Muller Clausthal University of Technology, Germany
* Nikolay Mehandjiev University of Manchester, UK
* Eduardo Ramirez Tecnologico de Monterrey , Mexico
* Nick B. Szirbik, University of Groningen, Netherlands


For additional information, please visit http://wetice.org/workshops.php
or contact the organizers using acec09 at mbs.ac.uk