CFP: ATOP Workshop @ AAMAS 2006

			       Call for Papers

		  Agent-based Technologies and applications
		       for enterprise interOPerability
				  ATOP 2006
		       (http://www.dfki.de/~kuf/atop/)

			  Workshop to be held at the
		   Fifth International Joint Conference on
	     Autonomous Agents & Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2006)
		      (http://www.fun.ac.jp/aamas2006/)

		      Future University-Hakodate, Japan

				 8th May 2006

MOTIVATION

Today's enterprises operate in a dynamic environment which is characterized by
global  outsourcing, shrinking  product life-cycles,  and unstable  demand. To
prosper  in  this  environment,  enterprises  face a  growing  need  to  share
information and  to collaborate  with each  other at all  levels of  the value
chain.    As  organizations   are  gradually   transforming   into  "networked
organizations",  interoperability becomes  the main  challenge to  realize the
vision  of  seamless business  interaction  across organizational  boundaries.
Interoperability  problems occur at  different levels:  at the  business level
(how organizations do business together, what needs to be described and how?),
at the  knowledge level (different  formats, schemas, and ontologies),  and at
the level  of the underlying information and  communication technologies (ICT)
and systems.

Agent  technologies  provide  a  cross-cutting approach  promising  to  enable
intelligent  and  proactive   automation,  adaptive  planning  and  execution,
decentralized coordination,  and semantic interoperability.   The Model-Driven
Architecture  (MDA)   is  another  promising  approach  for   the  support  of
interoperability  due  to  its  promise  of  providing  consistent  models  at
different  abstraction  layers with  well-defined  mappings  in between  these
layers.  As  a third thread  of activity Service-Oriented  Architectures (SOA)
try  to reach  interoperability, focusing  upon,  but not  restricted to,  the
information and  communication technology (ICT) level.   The main contribution
and  goal  of  SOA  is  to  achieve loose  coupling  among  software  entities
representing business objects (processes, organizational units, etc.).

Agents, MDA, and SOA provide complementary solution components to parts of the
enterprise  interoperability  problems.  It  is  unlikely  that  any of  these
approaches   will   succeed   stand-alone   in   achieving   the   degree   of
interoperability that  will be necessary  to successfully construct,  run, and
optimize networked organizations.   It is rather likely that  a combination of
these  basic  technologies  will  evolve  in  the next  years  to  provide  an
appropriate  basis  for  interoperability.   Therefore the  workshop  aims  at
bringing together researchers and foster interaction and collaboration to work
jointly on solutions to achieve interoperability.

ATOP is  set up as a  workshop series which  was first introduced to  AAMAS in
2005. The workshop  focuses on  technologies that support  interoperability in
networked organizations, on successful applications of these technologies, and
on lessons learned.  The main goal is to discuss in how far agent technologies
can support interoperability in this  context and to compare current trends in
the   development  of   agent   technologies  with   recent  developments   in
service-oriented and model-driven system  design with respect to their ability
to solve interoperability problems.  A publication of selected workshop papers
is planned in Springer's LNAI series.

WORKSHOP TOPICS

Ideally submitted papers should deal with agent technologies in the context of:

     * simulation and validation of business systems
     * decision-support in value creation networks
     * enterprise and business process modeling
     * case studies of implemented interoperability solutions and
       systems
     * coordination and negotiation in distributed business networks
     * cross-organizational business processes
     * decentralized and peer-to-peer models and enactment of
       business processes
     * goal-driven and adaptive business process management
     * semantic annotations of business process descriptions
     * intelligent enterprise application integration
     * intelligent execution, monitoring, management, and optimization
       of business processes
     * service-oriented architectures and related topics like service
       choreography, orchestration, composition, brokering, and mediation
     * autonomic computing and adaptive autonomous architectures
     * model-driven architectures for business processes and systems
     * models and meta-models for agent-based systems
     * platform-independent models and their relation to agent models
     * model-to-model and model-to-text transformations
     * knowledge representations and ontologies in the context of
       (collaborative) business processes
     * agent communication languages and standards
     * self-organization and adaptation in the context of interoperable systems

While  discussing  these topics,  papers  should make  clear  in  how far  the
technologies or  the proposed approach  is able to foster  interoperability of
business systems. While the discussion of agent technologies is recommended, a
proposal  of new techniques  or technologies  to increase  interoperability of
business  applications  without  direct  reference to  agent  technologies  is
acceptable in exceptional cases. Still it is recommended that such work should
be   related  to   agent-oriented  approaches   if  such   approaches  already
exist. Researchers interested in submitting  a paper to ATOP are encouraged to
visit the Web page http://www.dfki.de/~kuf/atop/ and check the paper regarding
the  topics that  were discussed  during  the ATOP  2005 workshop.   Workshops
specializing in some of the topics mentioned in the above list will be held at
AAMAS 2006.  Authors of papers that  are dealing with such topics without much
discussion of  interoperability aspects are encouraged to  submit their papers
to  the more  specialized  workshops.  The  workshop  organizers will  closely
collaborate in  the evaluation of the papers.  Therefore, multiple submissions
do not increase the chance of a paper to be accepted.

SUBMISSION DETAILS

Authors  should submit  original research  papers  (must not  exceed 12  pages
including all figures and tables) including  an abstract of about 200 words or
position  papers  (must  not  exceed  3  pages). In  any  case  submission  of
preliminary  abstracts some time  before the  official submission  deadline is
very much appreciated. All submissions must be sent electronically to

			    Klaus.Fischer@dfki.de

Acceptable  formats are PDF  and PostScript.  It is  planned to  structure the
workshops   into   invited    talks,   technical   presentations   and   panel
discussions.     Formatting      instructions     can     be      found     at
http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html    and   should    be   strictly
followed. The first  page should include the full name  and contact details of
at least one author (email and full postal address).

IMPORTANT DATES

Submissions due              February 1 2006
Notifications sent           February 19 2006
Final papers due             March 13 2006
Workshop                     May 8 2006

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

Arne-Jorgen Berre, SINTEF, Norway
Klaus Fischer, DFKI, Germany
Joerg P. Mueller, Technische Universitaet Clausthal, Germany

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Asier Azaceta, European Software Institute, Spain
Sahin Albayrak, TU Berlin, Germany
Bernhard Bauer, University Augsburg, Germany
Gorka Benguria, European Software Institute, Spain
Hans-Dieter Burkhard, Humboldt University, Germany
Amit Chopra, NC State University, USA
Michael Georgeff, Monash University, Australia
Timo Kahl, IWi, Germany
David Kinny, Melbourne University, Australia
Stefan Kirn, Hohenheim University, Germany
Michele Missikoff, LEKS, Italy
Eugenio Oliveira, University of Porto, Portugal
Alan Powell, IBM UK Labs, England
Omer Rana, Cardiff University, UK
Ralph Ronnquist, Agent Oriented Software, Australia
Rainer Ruggaber, SAP, Germany
Carles Sierra, IIIA, Spain
Donald Steiner, Quantum Leap Innovations, USA
Joerg Ziemann, IWi, Germany
Ingo Zinnikus, DFKI, Germany
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Received on Tuesday, 24 January 2006 20:43:06 UTC