CALL  FOR  PAPERS

                     2nd International Workshop on 
                  Software Engineering for Large-Scale 
                          Multi-Agent Systems
                             (SELMAS 2003)
            http://www.teccomm.les.inf.puc-rio.br/selmas2003


         International Conference on Software Engineering 2003
                 http://cs.oregonstate.edu/icse2003/

                            May 3-4, 2003
                         Portland, Oregon, USA


Advances in networking technology have revitalized the investigation
of the agent technology as a promising paradigm to engineer complex
distributed software systems. Nowadays, the agent technology has been
applied in a wide range of application domains, including e-commerce,
human-computer interfaces, telecommunications, and concurrent
engineering. In general, software agents are viewed as complex objects
with an attitude. Like objects, agents provide a specific set of
services for their users. In fact, objects and agents exhibit points
of similarity, but the development of multi-agent systems (MASs) poses
other challenges to software engineering since software agents are
inherently more complex abstractions. A single agent is driven by
beliefs, goals, plans, and a number of behavioral properties such as
autonomy, adaptation, interaction, collaboration, learning and
mobility. Each of these features introduces additional complexity to
the system modeling, design and implementation, and consequently,
increases the probability of exceptional situation manifestation,
security violations and so on. In addition, as the agent paradigm is
devoted to the complex distributed system development, a large-scale
MAS encompasses multiple types of agents, each of them having distinct
agency properties, and it needs to satisfy multiple stringent
requirements such as reliability, security, adaptability,
interoperability, scalability, maintainability, and
reusability. However, many existing agent-oriented solutions are far
from ideal; in practice, they are often built in an ad-hoc manner and
are error-prone, not scalable, and not generally applicable to large
MAS. This workshop, aimed to discuss these issues, follows up on the
success of the 1st Workshop on Software Engineering for Large-Scale
Multi-Agent Systems (SELMAS’02), held in Orlando, USA, May 19,
2002, as part of the ICSE’02. The 1st SELMAS workshop was very
successful due to the high quality of the submissions, the active
participation of the audience, the exceptional profile of the
panelists, and the current edition of a Springer book publishing
refereed workshop papers.

Research in multi-agent software engineering has been carried out
according two different approaches: (i) agent-based software
engineering, and (ii) object-oriented software engineering for
MASs. Researchers following the first approach persuasively argue that
multi-agent systems are often much more complex than object-oriented
systems and hence the traditional object model generally fails to
capture the complexity of multi-agent systems. In this approach,
agents are a new abstraction that substitutes for the object
abstraction realizing the agent abstraction as a new software
engineering paradigm. As a result, proponents of this approach claim
that it is necessary to develop new software engineering techniques,
methods, and methodologies that are specifically tailored to
agents. On the other hand, researchers adhering the second approach
propose the integration of agents into the object-orientation world
and, thus, they think of objects and agents as similar
abstractions. As a result, their research has focused on using and
extending the techniques existing in object-oriented software
engineering, such as design patterns, frameworks, and modeling
languages, to multi-agent software engineering.


Goals 

The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers and
practitioners from both approaches to discuss the current state and
future direction of research in software engineering for large-scale
MASs. In addition, the workshop is a forum to learn about the latest
research, and also discuss and exchange ideas concerning ongoing
work. Particular interests of this workshop are: (i) Determine the
overlap and integration of the two general research approaches for
multi-agent software engineering; (ii) Understand those issues in the
agent technology that difficult and/or improve the production of
large-scale distributed systems; (iii) Provide a comprehensive
overview of existing software engineering techniques that may
successfully be applied to deal with the complexity associated with
realistic multi-agent software.


Scope. 

The workshop is intended to cover wide ranges of topics of software
engineering for large-scale multi-agent systems, from theoretical
foundations to empirical studies. We welcome the submission of papers
in all aspects of agent-multi software engineering, including the
following (but are not limited to):

- Software engineering theories for large-scale MAS 
- Comparative studies between multi-agent systems and object-oriented systems 
- Pitfalls and learned lessons in the construction of large MAS 
- Experiments and case studies with large-scale MAS development 
- Advanced separation of concerns in the context of MAS 
- Design patterns, design principles, and architectural styles 
- Frameworks and software architectures 
- Reflective software architectures 
- Coordination architectures, infrastructures, and tools 
- Domain-specific languages for MAS 
- Requirements engineering for MAS 
- Software reliability engineering and MAS 
- Exception handling and fault-tolerance techniques 
- Mobility and security issues in large MAS 
- Software engineering techniques for resource-bounded MAS 
- MAS development and pervasive computing 
- Verification and validation techniques for MAS 
- Software development environments for real-life MAS 
- Modeling of large MAS 
- UML application to large-scale MAS 
- Methodologies for agent-oriented analysis and design 
- Testing and metrics for MAS 

 
How to Submit. 

Format and Submissions. The format of the workshop will combine short
presentations and focused discussion groups. The number of
participants will be between 40 and 50, and it will be restricted to
authors of accepted papers and to a few invited guests. Prospective
participants should submit electronically a position paper (between 5
and 8 pages) in PDF format to José Alberto Sardinha
(sardinha@inf.puc-rio.br) by February 1, 2003. The format of submitted
papers must follow the ICSE/ACM conference proceedings
guidelines(http://cs.oregonstate.edu/icse2003/), including no page
numbers. We encourage authors to present novel ideas, critique of
existing work, and practical studies and experiments, which
demonstrate how software engineering techniques can assist the
development of large-scale multi-agent systems.


Submission Due Dates.

* Submission Date:         February 1, 2003
* Accceptance/rejection:   March 1, 2003
* Camera-ready Copy:       April 1, 2003


Review Process.

The submission of papers will be followed by a review process by the
PC, with the final decision made by the Workshop Organizers.


Organizing Committee.

Jose Alberto R. P. Sardinha - Primary Contact
PUC-Rio - Brazil (sardinha@inf.puc-rio.br)  

Alessandro Garcia 
PUC-Rio - Brazil (afgarcia@inf.puc-rio.br)  

Carlos Lucena
PUC-Rio - Brazil (lucena@inf.puc-rio.br) 

Jaelson Castro
Federal University of Pernambuco - Brazil (jbc@cin.ufpe.br)  

Alexander Romanovsky
University of Newcastle upon Tyne - UK (alexander.romanovsky@ncl.ac.uk)   

Paulo Alencar
University of Waterloo - Canada(palencar@csg.uwaterloo.ca)

Donald Cowan
University of Waterloo - Canada(dcowan@csg.uwaterloo.ca)


Programme Committee (to be confirmed).

- Mohamed Fayad (University of Nebraska - USA)
- Mike Wooldridge (University of London - UK)
- Ruy Milidiu (PUC-Rio - Brazil)
- Paulo Alencar (University of Waterloo - Canada)
- Donald Cowan (University of Waterloo - Canada)
- Liz Kendall (Monash University - Australia)
- Anand Tripathi (University of Minnesota - USA) 
- Cecilia Rubira (UNICAMP - Brazil) 
- Marcus Fontoura (IBM Almaden Research Center - USA) 
- Simon Stobart (University of Sunderland - UK) 
- Nick Jennings (Southampton University - UK) 
- James Odell (OMG) 
- Julio Leite (PUC-Rio - Brazil) 
- Ciaran Bryce (University of Geneve - Switzerland) 
- Gerhard Weiss (Technical University of Munich - Germany) 
- Van Parunak (Altarum Institute - USA) 
- Dan Marinescu (Central Florida University - USA)
- Eric Yu (University of Toronto - Canada)
- Marco Mamei (University of Modena & Reggio Emilia - Italy) 
- Martin Fredriksson (Blekinge Institute of Technology - Sweden)
- Mark d'Inverno (University of Westminster - UK)
- Awais Rashid (Lancaster University - UK)
- Katia Sycara (Carnegie Mellon University - USA)
- Gerd Wagner (Eindhonven University of Technology - The Netherlands)
- Carlos Angel Iglesias Fernandez (Politechnical University of Madrid - Spain)
- Martin Griss (HP Research Laboratory - USA)
- Robert Kessler (University of Utah)
- John Debenham (University of Technology, Sydeney, Australia)
- Brian Henderson-Sellers (University of Technology, Sydeney, Australia)
- Bernhard Bauer (Siemens)
- Scott A. DeLoach (Kansas State University)
- Paolo Giorgini (University of Trento)
- Marie-Pierre Gleizes (Universite paul Sabatier, Toulouse)
- Michael Huhns (University of South Carolina)
- Catholijn Jonker (Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam)
- David Kinny (University of Melbourne)
- Yannis Labrou (Fujitsu Laboratories of America, Inc.)
- Jean-Pierre Briot (Centre national de la recherche scientifique, France)
- Michael Weiss (Carleton University)
- Michael Stal (Siemens)
- José Carlos Maldonado (USP, Brazil)
- Markus Endler (PUC-Rio, Brazil)
- Rogério de Lemos (The University of Kent, UK)
- Danny Lange (Vocomo Software Corp)
- Elisa Husita (Universidade Estadual de Maringá, Brazil)
- Anna Perini (Istituto per la Ricerca Scientifica e Tecnologica, Italy)
- Federico Bergenti (Universita` degli Studi di Parma, Italy) 
- Juergen Lind (AgentLab, Germany)
- Olivier Gutknecht (France)
- Marie-Pierre Gervais (Le Laboratoire d'Informatique de Paris 6, France)
- Tom Maibaum (King's College London, UK)
- Tom Holvoet (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium)
- Luiz Cysneiros (York University, Canada)
- Andrés Díaz Pace (UNCPBA University, Argentina)
- Les Gasser (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA)
- Gustavo Rossi (Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Argentina)