(sorry for multiple postings)
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International Workshop on
Organizations in Multi-Agent Systems: From Organizations to Organization
Oriented Programming (OOOP)
http://ooop.emse.fr
To be held at the
Fourth International Joint Conference on
Autonomous Agents & Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS 2005)
Utrecht, the Netherlands
25 or 26 July 2005
This workshop will be organized within the fourth International
Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi Agent Systems in Utrecht, the
Netherlands.
Prospective participants must also register for the AAMAS
2005 conference. The number of participants is strictly limited.
In recent years, social and organizational aspects of agency have
become a major issue in MAS research. Moreover, recent applications of MAS
on Web Services, Grid Computing and Ubiquitous Computing enforce the need
for using these aspects in order to ensure social order within these
systems. Openness, heterogeneity, and scalability of MAS pose new demands
on traditional MAS organizational models. These demands
include the integration of organizational and individual perspectives, and
the dynamic adaptation of models to organizational and
environmental changes. Organizational self-design will play a critical
role in the development of scalable systems. As systems grow to
include an increasing number of agents, the view of coordination and
control has to be expanded to consider both the agent-centric as well as
the organization-centric views.
Practical applications of agents in organizational modeling are being
widely developed. All this contributes to an emerging field of
research and work that could be called Organization Oriented
Programming. Formal theories, tools and methodologies for this purpose
are, however, in short supply.
Furthermore, organizations are at the intersection of multiple MAS
research areas i.e. institutions, norms, interaction, coordination, etc.
As such, it is necessary to get a closer look at the
relationships between all these concepts. The overall problem of
analyzing the social, economic and technological dimensions of agent
organizations, and the co-evolution of agent and human, social and
personal structures in the organization, provide theoretically
demanding and interdisciplinary research questions at different levels of
abstraction. Organizational research is increasingly recognizing the
advantage of agent-based (and other AI) models for gaining insight into
organizational issues, and in exploring dynamic processes and
configurations. On the other hand, organizational research has been active
in the field of organizational modeling for many years, and has developed
insights and theories that are very useful for MAS
researchers.
Even if an externally designed organizational structure is a necessary
coordination device to achieve global social order there is a special
tension between such imposed constraints and the agents' autonomous
behaviour. In fact autonomy is often needed for concretely
implementing social order because autonomous agents can intelligently
adapt the designed organization to particular cases and can face
unpredicted events. From this perspective autonomy can also be a
possible source of internal change in the designed organizational
structure. Differently, autonomous behaviour can also originate forms of
self-organization which emerge out of local interactions and are only
partially externally programmed. In such situations the
self-organized order and the externally designed organization can even be
in conflict. A special track of the workshop will be focused on the
trade-off between social order and agent autonomy. Authors are
encouraged to submit papers to this special track that focus on the means
to achieve social order in MAS other than organizations, on
agent autonomy in MAS, and the interplay between social order and
autonomy.
Target Audience
***************
Following successful recent workshops on social notions of
multi-agency and on the use of MAS approaches to the modeling and
simulation of organizations and societies, this workshop seeks to
bring together researchers from the area between organizational
modeling and MAS, working on organizational aspects of MAS and
researchers interested in achieving a trade-off between social order and
autonomy in multi-agent systems.
Topics:
********
We are seeking papers that clearly exemplify central notions in a
research field or try to synthesize unified views. Relevant topics
include, but are not limited to the following:
- Modeling multi-agent organizations
- Organization design, monitoring and adaptation
- Engineering organizations (validation, implementation and tools for
agent organizations
- Scaling and control issues in agent organizations
- Norms, institutions and organizations, Authority, power, dependence,
penalty and sanctions, contracts, trust, reputation as regulating tools
for autonomous agents within organizations,
- Application of organizational theory to MAS
- Simulation, analysis and verification of dynamics of multi-agent
organizations
- Dynamic, adaptive and emergent organizational structures and dynamics -
Practical application examples for (aspect of) agent organization
systems: applications of agent organizations to knowledge management,
CSCW, workflow, etc.
- Human-Computer interaction in agent organizations, Balancing
authority between agents and users
Papers can be submitted for the special track on Social Order
vs. Autonomy, for which some of the most relevant topics are listed below:
- coordination languages and infrastructures, coordination models in
MAS, teamwork
- subjective vs. objective coordination
- formalisms, methods, techniques and tools for modeling, specifying
and implementing agent autonomy
- issues of reliability, robustness and stability arising from agent
autonomy
- autonomous modification of the coordination framework by the agents
themselves
Submission Procedure and Formatting Guidelines
**********************************************
- Authors should (electronically) submit, in PS or PDF format, a
full-scale paper, not longer than 16 pages (references and figures
included) to [log in to unmask]
- The papers should be named as: contact-author-surname.ps (.pdf). -
Authors should submit an ASCII abstract, with the following
information: title of paper; names and affiliations of authors; name,
email, snail mail, phone number, and fax number of contact author;
chosen track ("organizations" or "social order vs autonomy");
abstract.
The same information should be included on the first page of submitted
papers.
- Papers must be written in English, with a maximum length of 16
pages. Please format papers according to the LNCS/LNAI style (style
available at: http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html)
- All correspondence will be with the specified contact author.
Publication
***********
- Accepted papers will be published in a workshop note and
distributed among participants during the workshop.
- We are negotiating with Springer the possibility of a
post-publication as a LNAI or LNCS volume.
Important Dates
***************
- Submission due: 14 March 2005 (no extensions)
- Notifications sent: 18 April 2005
- Camera-ready due: 15 May 2005
- Workshop: 25 or 26 July 2005 (actual Date TBD)
Organizing Committee
********************
- Olivier Boissier (Primary Contact), ENS Mines Saint-Etienne (France) -
Virginia Dignum, University of Utrecht (The Netherlands)
- Eric Matson, Wright State University (USA)
- Jaime Simao Sichman, University of Sao Paulo (Brazil)
Program Committee
*****************
Guido Boella, University of Torino (Italy)
Cosmin Carabelea, ENS Mines Saint-Etienne (France)
Cristiano Castelfranchi,ISTC/CNR (Italy)
Daniel Corkill, University of Massachusetts (USA),
Ulisses Cortés, UPC (Spain)
Antonio Carlos da Rocha Costa, UCPEL (Brazil)
Bruce Edmonds, CPM, Manchester Metropolitan University (UK)
Jacques Ferber, LIRMM (France)
Fabien Gandon, INRIA Sophia-Antipolis (France)
Paolo Giorgini, University of Trento (Italy)
Jomi Hubner, FURB (Brazil)
Victor Lesser, University of Massachusetts (USA)
Philippe Lamarre, LINA (France)
Christian Lemaitre (Mexico)
Michael Luck, University of Southampton (UK)
John-Jules Meyer, Utrecht University (The Netherlands)
Steve Munroe, University of Southampton (UK)
Timothy Norman, University of Aberdeen (UK)
James Odell, James Odell Associates (USA)
Andrea Omicini, DEIS University of Bologna (Italy)
Alessandro Ricci, DEIS University of Bologna (Italy)
Paul Scerri, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University (USA) Carles
Sierra, IIIA (Spain)
Viviane Da Silva, PUC (Brazil)
Liz Sonenberg, The University of Melbourne (Australia)
Catherine Tessier, ONERA (France)
Luca Tummolini, ISTC-CNR Rome (Italy)
Javier Vázquez-Salceda, Utrecht University (The Netherlands)
--------------------------
Furthermore, if you have any inquiry please do not hesitate to contact the
primary contact ([log in to unmask])
Looking forward to meeting you all at OOOP'05 and AAMAS '05.
Olivier, Virginia, Eric, and Jaime.
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