Software Engineering for Large-Scale Multi-Agent ... - Semantic Scholar

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Martin Griss. University of California at Santa Cruz ... David Kung. University of Texas at Arlington ... have turned the agent technology into a promising paradigm.
Software Engineering for Large-Scale Multi-Agent Systems – SELMAS’04 Ricardo Choren, Alessandro Garcia, Carlos Lucena Pontif´ıcia Universidade Cat´olica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio) Computer Science Department – Brazil {choren, afgarcia, lucena}@inf.puc-rio.br Martin Griss University of California at Santa Cruz Department of Computer Science – USA [email protected]

David Kung University of Texas at Arlington Computer Science and Engineering Dept – USA [email protected]

Naftaly Minsky Rutgers University Department of Computer Science – USA [email protected]

Alexander Romanovsky University of Newcastle upon Tyne School of Computing Science – United Kingdom [email protected]

Abstract The development of multi-agent systems (MAS) is not a trivial task. In addition, with the advances in Internet technologies, MAS are undergoing a transition from closed to open architectures composed of a huge number of autonomous agents, which operate and move across different environments. In fact, openness introduces additional complexity to the system modeling, design and implementation. It also impacts on most quality attributes of MAS, including scalability, interoperability, reliability and adaptability. This workshop brings together researchers and practitioners to discuss the current state and future direction of research in software engineering for open MAS. A particular interest is to understand those issues in the agent technology that make it difficult and/or improve the production of large open systems.

There are many techniques for dealing with individual agents or systems built using only few agents. However, the agent technology is now being applied to the development of large open industrial software systems. Without adequate development techniques and methods, such systems will not be sufficiently dependable, trustable and extensible. Thus, they will be difficult to comprehend, and their components will not be reusable. The complexity associated with MAS in an open setting involves numerous facets and dimensions. When a large set of agents interact over heterogeneous environments, several problems appear. It makes their coordination and management more difficult and it increases the probability of exceptional situations, security holes, unexpected global effects, and so on. Commercial success for open agent-based applications will require software engineering approaches in order to enable effective scalable deployment.

2. Goals 1. Motivation Advances in networking technology in the last few years have turned the agent technology into a promising paradigm to engineer complex distributed software systems. Nowadays, it has been applied to a wide range of application domains, including e-commerce, human-computer interfaces, telecommunications, and concurrent engineering. Since a software agent is an inherently more complex abstraction, the development of multi-agent systems (MAS) poses new challenges to Software Engineering.

SELMAS’04 is a forum to bring together researchers and practitioners to discuss the current state of the art and the future research directions in software engineering for largescale open MAS. Particular interests of this workshop are: 1. Determine the challenges of engineering open MASs; 2. Understand those issues in the agent technology that make it difficult and/or improve the production of large open systems, and; 3. Provide a comprehensive overview of existing software engineering techniques that may successfully be ap-

Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE’04) 0270-5257/04 $20.00 © 2004 IEEE

plied to deal with the complexity associated with open multi-agent software.

3. Program Committee Paulo Alencar [University of Waterloo - Canada] Bernhard Bauer [Universit¨at Augsburg - Germany] Federico Bergenti [Universit`a degli Studi di Parma - Italy] M. Brian Blake [Georgetown University - USA] Lotzi Boloni [University of Central Florida - USA] Paolo Bresciani [IRST - Italy] Jean-Pierre Briot [CNRS - France] Jaelson Castro [UFPE - Brazil] Ricardo Choren [PUC-Rio - Brazil] Scott Cost [University of Maryland - USA] John Debenham [U. of Technology at Sydney - Australia] Prem Devanbu [University of California at Davis - USA] Christophe Dony [Universit´e Montpellier II - France] Carlos A. Fernandez [U. Polit´ecnica de Madrid - Spain] Marcus Fontoura [IBM Almaden Research Center - USA] Martin Fredriksson [Blekinge Inst of Technology - Sweden] Alessandro Garcia [PUC-Rio - Brazil] Marie-Pierre Gervais [LIP 6 - France] Joseph Giampapa [Carnegie Mellon University - USA] Paolo Giorgini [Universit`a degli Studi di Trento - Italy] Marie-Pierre Gleizes [IRIT - France] Martin Griss [University of California at Santa Cruz - USA] Zahia Guessoum [LIP 6 - France] Olivier Gutknecht [LIRMM - France] Tom Holvoet [Katholieke Universiteit Leuven - Belgium] Michael Huhns [University of South Carolina - USA] Elisa Huzita [Universidade Estadual de Maring´a - Brazil] Mark d’Inverno [University of Westminster - UK] Catholijn Jonker [Vrije Universiteit - The Netherlands] Robert Kessler [University of Utah - USA] David Kung [University of Texas at Arlington - USA] Rog´erio de Lemos [University of Kent - UK] Carlos Lucena [PUC-Rio - Brazil] Roger Mailler [University of Massachusetts - USA] Marco Mamei [U. di Modena e Reggio Emilia - Italy] Naftaly Minsky [Rutgers University - USA] Eug´enio Oliveira [Universidade do Porto - Portugal] Andrea Omicini [University of Bologna - Italy] Andr´es D´ıaz Pace [UNCPBA - Argentina] Anna Perini [IRST - Italy] Omer Rana [Cardiff University - UK] Awais Rashid [Lancaster University - UK] Alexander Romanovsky [U. of Newcastle upon Tyne - UK] Gustavo Rossi [U. Nacional de La Plata - Argentina] Cec´ılia Rubira [UNICAMP - Brazil] Brian Henderson-Sellers [U. of Tech. Sydney - Australia] Arndt von Staa [PUC-Rio - Brazil] Michael Stal [Siemens - Germany]

Walt Truszkowski [NASA - USA] Michael Weiss [Carleton University - Canada] Andrea Zisman [City University - UK]

4. Workshop Activities SELMAS’04 is a two full-day event, structured around sessions of theme-oriented presentations. Following each session, workshop participants will engage in structured discussions to foster the exchange of ideas and information. The format of the sessions will combine presentations of submitted position papers, invited talks, and focused discussion groups. SELMAS’04 provides an opportunity for exchanging information related to new research and empirical results in areas including (but not limited to): - Advanced separation of concerns of MAS - Comparative studies between MAS and OO systems - Coordination architectures, infrastructures, and tools - Design patterns, design principles, and architectural styles - Domain-specific languages for MAS - Exception handling and fault-tolerance techniques - Experiments and case studies of large MAS - Frameworks and software architectures - MAS development and pervasive computing - Methodologies for agent-oriented analysis and design - Mobility and security issues in large MAS - Modeling of large MAS - Requirements engineering for MAS - Software development environments for real-life MAS - Software engineering theories for large-scale MAS - Software reliability engineering and MAS - Techniques for resource-bounded MAS - Testing and metrics for MAS - UML application to large-scale MAS - Verification and validation techniques for MAS By gathering a set of people with expertise in a broad range of topics, we intend to integrate our perspectives on software engineering for large-scale open MAS. At the end of the workshop there will be a general discussion about areas or topics of research that the participants perceived as important.

5. Workshop Outputs All the results obtained by the discussions will be summarized and published as a technical report and made electronically available at the workshop website. The aim is to highlight issues that shall become part of the forthcoming research agenda. For further details, please visit our website: http://www.teccomm.les.inf.puc-rio.br/selmas2004/

Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE’04) 0270-5257/04 $20.00 © 2004 IEEE