Engineering Societies In The Agents World Iv

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Engineering Societies in the Agents World, ESAW 2004, held in London, UK in October 2004. The 23 revised full papers presented were carefully selected during two rounds of reviewing and improvement for inclusion in the book; also included are 2 invited papers by leading researchers in order to round of the coverage of the relevant topics. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: - multidisciplinary for agent societies - coordination, organization, and security of agent societies - abstractions, methodologies, and tools for engineering agent societies - applications of agent societies

The fourth internationalworkshop,“EngineeringSocietiesin the Agents World” (ESAW 2003) was a three-dayevent that took place at the end of October 2003. After previous events in Germany, the Czech Republic, and Spain, the workshop crossed the Channel, to be held at the premises of Imperial College, London. The steady increase in the variety of backgrounds of contributing sci- tists, fascinating new perspectives on the topics, and number of participants, bespeaks the success of the ESAW workshop series. Its idea was born in 1999 among members of the working group on “Communication, Coordination, and Collaboration” of the ?rst lease of life of the European Network of Excellence on Agent-Based Computing, AgentLink, out of a critical discussion about the general mindset of the agent community. At that time, we felt that proper c- siderationsofsystemicaspectsofagenttechnologydeployment,suchasackno- edgement of the importance of the social and environmental perspectives, were sorely missing: a de?ciency that we resolved should be addressed directly by a new forum.

The ?rst workshop “Engineering Societies in the Agents World” (ESAW) was held in August 2000, in conjunction with the 14th European Conference on Arti?cial Intelligence (ECAI 2000) in Berlin. It was launched by a group of - searchers who thought that the design and development of MASs (multi-agent systems) not only needed adequate theoretical foundations but also a call for new techniques, methodologies and infrastructures to develop MASs as arti?cial societies. The second ESAW was co-located with the European Agent Summer School (ACAI 2001) in Prague, and mostly focused on logics and languages, middleware, infrastructures and applications. In Madrid, the third ESAW c- centrated on models and methodologies and took place with the “Cooperative Information Agents” workshop (CIA 2002). The fourth ESAW in London was the ?rst one that ran as a stand-alone event: apart from the usual works on methodologies and models, it also stressed the issues of applications and m- tidisciplinary models. Based on the success of previous ESAWs, and also given that the di?cult challenges in the construction of arti?cial societies are not yet fully addressed, the ?fth ESAW workshop was organized in the same spirit as its predecessors. Inparticular,ESAW2004tookplaceattheIRITlaboratoryoftheUniversit ́ e “Paul Sabatier” (Toulouse, France), at the end of October 2004. It was not - located with any other scienti?c event, in the same way as ESAW 2003. ESAW 2004 remained committed to the use of the notion of MASs as the seeds for animated, constructive and highly interdisciplinary discussions about techno- gies,methodologiesandtoolsfortheengineeringofcomplexdistributedsystems.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Engineering Societies in the Agents World, ESAW 2007, held in Athens, Greece, in October 2007. The 19 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in this book. The papers are organized in topical sections on electronic institutions, models of complex distributed systems with agents and societies; interaction in agent societies; engineering social intelligence in multi-agent systems; trust and reputation in agent societies; analysis, design and development of agent societies.

The aim of the CEEMAS conference series is to provide a biennial forum for the presentation of multi-agent research and development results. With its p- ticular geographicalorientation towards Central and Eastern Europe, CEEMAS has become an internationally recognised event with participants from all over the world. After the successful CEEMAS conferences in St. Petersburg (1999), Cracow (2001) and Prague (2003), the 2005 CEEMAS conference takes place in Budapest. The programme committee of the conference series consists of est- lished researchers from the region and renowned international colleagues, sh- ing the prominent rank of CEEMAS among the leading events in multi-agent systems. In the very competitive ?eld of agent oriented conferences and workshops nowadays(suchasAAMAS,WI/IAT,EUMAS,CIA,MATES)thespecialpro?le of CEEMAS is that it is trying to bridge the gap between applied research achievements and theoretical research activities. Our ambition is to provide a forum for presenting theoretical research with an evident application potential, implemented application prototypes and their properties, as well as industrial case studies of successful (but also unsuccessful) agent technology deployments. This is why the CEEMAS proceedings volume provides a collection of research and application papers. The technical research paper section of the proceedings (see pages 11–499) contains pure research papers as well as research results in application settings while the application papers section (see pages 500–530) contains papers focused on application aspects. The goal is to demonstrate the real life value and commercial reality of multi-agent systems as well as to foster communication between academia and industry in this ?eld.

This book presents a coherent and well-balanced survey of recent advances in software engineering approaches to the design and analysis of realistic large-scale multi-agent systems (MAS). The chapters included are devoted to various techniques and methods used to cope with the complexity of real-world MAS. The power of agent-based software engineering is illustrated using examples that are representative of successful applications. The 16 thoroughly reviewed and revised full papers are organized in topical sections on agent methodologies and processes, requirements engineering and software architectures, modeling languages, and dependability and coordination. Most of the papers were initially presented at the 3rd International Workshop on Software Engineering for Large-Scale Multi-agent Systems, SELMAS 2004, held in Edinburgh, UK in May 2004 in association with ICSE 2004. Other papers were invited to complete coverage of all relevant aspects.