Engineering Societies In The Agents World V

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Engineering Societies in the Agents World, ESAW 2004, held in Toulouse, France, in October 2004. The 23 revised full papers presented together with an invited paper went through two rounds of reviewing and improvement and were carefully selected from 48 initial submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on roles, organizations, and institutions for agents; social issues in multi-agent systems; cooperation and collective behavior in agent societies; methodologies and platforms for agent-oriented engineering; agent-oriented simulation; and models for multi-agent systems.

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.

The characteristics of software systems are undergoing dramatic changes. We are moving rapidly into the age of ubiquitous information services. Persistent computing systems are being embedded in everyday objects. They interact in an autonomouswaywith eachother to provideus with increasinglycomplexservices and functionalities that we can access at any time from anywhere. As a con- quence, not only do the numbers of components of software systems increase; there is also a strong qualitative impact. Software systems are increasingly made up of autonomous, proactive, networked components. These interact with each other in patterns and via mechanisms that can hardly be modeled in terms of classical models of interaction or service-oriented coordination. To some extent, future software systems will exhibit characteristics making them more res- blant of natural systems and societies than of mechanical systems and software architectures. This situation poses exciting challenges to computer scientists and software engineers. Already, software agents and multi-agent systems are recognized as both useful abstractions and e?ective technologies for the modeling and building of complex distributed applications. However, little is done with regard to e?- tive and methodic development of complex software systems in terms of mul- agent societies. An urgent need exists for novel approaches to software modeling and software engineering that enable the successful deployment of software s- tems made up ofa massive number ofautonomous components, and that allowus to control and predict their behaviour.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Engineering Societies in the Agents World, ESAW 2006, held in Dublin, Ireland. The 22 revised full papers are organized in topical sections on agent oriented system development, methodologies for agent societies, deliberative agents and social aspect, agent oriented simulation, adaptive systems, coordination, negotiation, protocols, and agents, networks and ambient intelligence.

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 9th International Workshop on Engineering Societies in the Agents World, ESAW 2008, held in Saint-Etienne, France, in September 2008. The 13 revised full papers presented together with 1 invited long paper were carefully selected from 29 submissions during two rounds of reviewing and revision. The papers are organized in topical sections on organisations and norm-governed systems, privacy and security, agent-oriented software engineering, emergence and self-organisation, as well as simulation.

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.

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.