CALL FOR PAPERS

The 11th International Workshop on
AGENT-ORIENTED SOFTWARE ENGINEERING (AOSE-2010)
http://www.irit.fr/AOSE2010

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To be held at The ninth International Joint Conference on Autonomous
Agents & Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS-2010) Toronto, Canada, May 10
(or 11) 2010


INTRODUCTION

Since the mid 1980s, software agents and multi-agent systems have
grown into a very active area of research and also commercial
development activity. One of the limiting factors in industry take
up of agent technology, however, is the lack of adequate software
engineering support, and knowledge in this area.

AOSE is focused on this problem and provides a forum for those who
study the synergies between software engineering and agent research.

The concept of an agent as an autonomous system, capable of
interacting with other agents in order to satisfy 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,
autonomous or semi-autonomous agents. This paradigm is especially
suited to complex systems.

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, or through a limited set of strictly synchronized threads
of control. Agent oriented modelling techniques are especially
useful in such applications.

Many current and emerging real-world applications – spanning
scenarios as diverse as worldwide computing, network enterprises,
ubiquitous computing, sensor networks, just to mention a few examples
-- have exactly the above characteristics. As a consequence, agent
oriented software engineering has become an important area: both as
a design modelling means, and as an interface to platforms which
include specialised infrastructure support for programming in terms
of semi-autonomous interacting processes.

The particular focus of this edition will be on how to bridge the
gap between AOSE and conventional software engineering. We aim to
look at the integration of concepts and techniques from multi-agent
systems with conventional engineering approaches on the one hand,
and the integration of agent-oriented software engineering and
methodologies with conventional engineering processes on the other
hand.

WORKSHOP STRUCTURE

All authors of papers will have only 10 minutes podium time to
provide the main idea or the main point of interest of their paper.
Per 4 presentations, people will have 50 minutes to discuss with
speakers.

Depending on the quality of submitted papers, we may consider having
two kinds of accepted papers. The first kind of paper will be
presented at the workshop and will appear in the post-proceedings.
The second ones will be accepted for presentation and they will have
an additional opportunity to contribute to the published
post-proceedings depending of the paper presentation.


DEMOS

The workshop will welcome live demos. These demos would be
performed by authors of accepted papers or registered attendants
without accepted papers. Authors of accepted papers would be
encouraged to show the software supporting their contribution.
Researchers not submitting regular papers but interested in showing
their software may participate as well. These attendees will be
invited to contact the workshop organizers in advance, in order
to organize the presentation of their software. Requests will be
evaluated by the organizers to determine the relevance and interest
for the workshop.


TOPICS OF INTEREST

The workshop welcomes the submission of all papers on aspects of
agent oriented software engineering. Particular attention will be
given to work that focusses on how to bridge the gap between AOSE
and conventional software engineering. Topics of interest include
but are not restricted to:

Integration of concepts and techniques from multi-agent systems
with conventional engineering approaches:
- agent-based solutions for managing complexity in software
engineering
- alignment of agents with service-oriented software development
- agents for self-adaptive systems
- agents for dynamic software product lines

Integration of agent-oriented software engineering and
methodologies with conventional engineering processes:
- goal-oriented design
- reusable design knowledge: patterns and reference
architectures
- qualities and tradeoffs of agent-based architectures
- agents and model-driven approaches
- verification of agent-based software
- middleware integration of agent-based software
- integration of agents with legacy systems
- testing of agent-based software
- validation of agent technology in practice
- CASE tools to support agent-oriented software development in
practice
- implications of introducing agent-based solutions on the
development organization
- standardization efforts for multi-agent systems


PROCEEDINGS

We plan to accept papers either as long or as short papers.
Accepted long papers and reviewed short papers will be considered
for the LNCS post-proceedings.

To appear in any of the proceedings generated within the workshop
it will be required to have attended and defended your contribution
in the workshop.

Proceedings from previous editions of AOSE were formally published
by Springer-Verlag within the LNCS series. The intention is, again,
to publish the proceedings with Springer.

SUBMISSION OF PAPERS

All papers, submitted as PDF files, must conform the LNCS
format and will have no more than 12 pages. Instructions and
templates can be found here:
http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html

The maximum length of the paper will be 12 pages.

Papers should be sent through the Easychair conference manager:
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=aose2010
The submission procedure requires authors to create an account
through the conference manager.


IMPORTANT DATES
FEBRUARY, 2, 2010 - paper submission
MARCH 2, 2010 - notification of accepted paper
MARCH 10, 2010 - camera ready submission
MAY 10-11, 2009: AOSE 2010 Workshop


ORGANISING COMMITTEE
Marie-Pierre Gleizes IRIT, Université Paul Sabatier, France
Danny Weyns DistriNet Labs, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven

Contact email: gleizes[this_is_an_at_]irit.fr
danny.weyns[this_is_an_at_]cs.kuleuven.be


STEERING COMMITTEE
Paolo Ciancarini, University of Bologna
Michael Wooldridge, University of Liverpool
Joerg Mueller, Clausthal University of Technology
Gerhard Weiss, University of Maastricht

PROGRAMME COMMITTEE
(in progress)