LAST CALL FOR PAPERS: ESOA'06 Workshop at AAMAS 2006

The Fourth International Workshop on Engineering Self-Organizing
                        Applications (ESOA'06)
			
Submission Deadline: February  1st, 2006

The Fourth International Workshop on Engineering Self-Organizing
Applications (ESOA'06 <http://esoa.altarum.net/esoa06/>) will be held on
Tuesday, 09 May 2006, in conjunction with The Fifth International Joint
Conference on Autonomous Agents & Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2006
<http://www.fun.ac.jp/aamas2006/>) Future University-Hakodate, Japan,
May 2006. It will be preceded on Monday, 08 May 2006, by the Tutorial on
Engineering Self-Organizing Applications.


Important Dates

Electronic paper submission deadline: *01 Feb 2006*
Paper notifications:                  *19 Feb 2006*
Camera ready paper:                   *20 Mar 2006*
Workshop date:                        *09 May 2006*


Summary

Today's information infrastructure is a global complex system that
consists of great numbers of local interacting components, a system that
is so complicated and dynamic that centralized hierarchical control is
generally not an option. To be able to competently operate in and
fruitfully contribute to this infrastructure, one must engineer systems
that are able to adapt to the constant environmental uncertainty and the
failure or replacement of its components, without direct human
intervention.

An attractive approach to meeting this challenge is to utilize the
principle of self-organizing local-to-global emergence. This approach is
based on the idea that rich and complex global properties can emerge
from purely local interaction between agents. Such systems generate
order via self-organization, self-regulation, self-repair and
self-maintenance and no global or central organizer is required.
However, when designing a system that is based only on local
interactions and the emergent properties resulting from these
interactions, it is a difficult research problem to characterize the
global behavior of the system as a whole. Self organizing applications
(SOAs) should be based on such an analysis and understanding.

More specifically: how do we structure the application components and
their interactions, so that the self-organization process results in the
desired functionality? How do we validate that the application performs
to the requirements within the range of scenarios expected during
deployment? What means of influencing the dynamics of the application
are available, and how effective are they? To address these questions,
approaches originating from diverse areas such as non-linear
optimization, knowledge-based programming and constraint problem solving
are currently being explored. Multi-agent simulations and analytic
modeling can be used to study emergent behavior in real systems. On the
other hand, results issued from complexity theory can be applied in
engineering of both multi-agent systems and self-organizing systems.
Furthermore, SOA engineers often take inspiration from biology,
chemistry, sociology and the physical world. For example, typical
examples of SOAs are systems that reproduce socially-based insect
behavior, such as ants-based systems, artificial life, or robots.

The goal of this workshop is to advance the state of the art,
investigating the problems mentioned above, and putting a particular
emphasis on an interdisciplinary approach. We encourage the
communication and cross-fertilization of several fields including:
agent-based systems, software engineering, information systems,
distributed systems, complex systems, optimization theory and non-linear
systems, neural networks, and evolutionary computation.

The ESOA'06 workshop welcomes papers on any specific aspect that may
support an engineering approach to self-organizing applications,  
including:

     * Foundational papers addressing formal definitions, modeling,
       specification and analysis of self-organizing and emergent  
behavior
     * Methodological papers related to the engineering, monitoring and
       control of software with emergent behavior
     * Middleware infrastructure papers presenting the characteristics
       and features of software infrastructures to support execution of
       adaptive components
     * Industrial applications of self-organizing / emergent software
     * Interpretation and discovery of examples of self-organized
       "engineering" in natural systems.

In particular, a non-exhaustive list of topics include:

     * *Models*
           o Analytic models of self-organization and emergent behavior
           o Self-organisation theories
           o Bio-inspired process algebra and formal specifications
           o Formal approaches to handling local/global agent behavior
           o Approaches to handling robustness, scalability, efficiency
             and maintenance in self-organising applications
           o Performance engineering of emergent behavior in multi
             agent-based systems
           o Game theoretic approaches to emergence in multi-agent  
systems
           o Cellular automata approaches to emergence in multi-agent
             systems
           o Self-organisation to support multi-agent scalability
     * *Interaction Mechanisms*
           o Nature-inspired interaction mechanisms
           o Emergent programs in actual real-world biological  
"programs"
           o Socially-inspired interaction mechanisms
           o Specification-based interaction mechanisms
           o Trust-based interaction mechanisms
     * *Methodologies, Models, Tools*
           o Methodologies for engineering self-organisation
           o Methodologies of decentralized control
           o Methods and algorithms of self-organization in multi-agent
             systems
           o Design of agent-based self-organising systems
           o Design of high-level goals and local interactions
           o Self-organising software characterisation frameworks
           o Self-organising assessment metrics
           o Performance engineering of emergent behavior in multi
             agent-based systems
           o Self-organising software architectures
     * *Middleware Technology*
           o Supporting nature-inspired coordination
           o Supporting socially-inspired techniques
           o Run-time environment for self-organising agents
     * *Experiences*
           o Reports on simulation experiences
           o Reports on self-organization phenomena observed in
             real-world systems
           o Comparison of traditional vs. self-organization approaches
           o Challenges and roadmap reports
     * *Applications*
           o Self-organising multi-agent based applications
           o Industrial self-organising applications
           o Self-organisation in manufacturing systems and supply chain
             management
           o Self-organized engineering principles evidenced in
             biological systems.
           o Self-organisation in business
           o Emergent information systems
           o Self-organisation in P2P and Grid systems
           o Self-organising computer and sensor networks
           o Self-assembly


Submissions

Papers must be submitted online at:
http://198.108.103.31/esoa06/openconf The submission should not exceed
15 pages in the Springer-Verlag LNCS style, either in PostScript or PDF
format. For those submitting papers in PDF format, please ensure that
the papers can be viewed by a standard reader. Thus we discourage the
use of special character sets.


Publication

All accepted papers will be available on the day of the workshop in a
set of working notes. Accepted papers may also be made available in
electronic format before the day of the workshop. We subsequently aim to
publish a common volume collecting the best papers from this workshop
and additional contributions, which will be published by Springer- 
Verlag.


Organizing Committee

     * Daniel Yamins
       Harvard University /(USA)/
       yamins /(at)/ fas.harvard.edu
     * Mark Jelasity
       University of Bologna /(Italy)/
       jelasity /(at)/ cs.unibo.it
     * Salima Hassas
       University of Lyon /(France)/
       hassas /(at)/ liris.cnrs.fr
     * Sven Brueckner
       Altarum Institute /(USA)/
       sven.brueckner /(at)/ altarum.org


Program Committee

     * David Hales, University of Bologna, Italy
     * Sergio Camorlinga University of Manitoba, Canada
     * Vincent Cicirello, Drexel University, USA
     * Giovanna Di Marzo Serugundo, University of Geneva, Switzerland
     * Marco Dorigo, IRIDIA, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium
     * Noria Foukia, University of Otago, New Zealand, USA
     * Maria Gini, University of Minnesota, USA
     * Marie-Pierre Gleizes, IRIT Toulouse, France
     * Manfred Hauswirth, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology,  
Switzerland
     * Anthony Karageorgos, University of Thessaly, Greece
     * Manolis Koubarakis, Technical University of Crete, Greece
     * Mark Klein, MIT Sloan School of Management, USA
     * Marco Mamei, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy
     * Paul Marrow, BT, UK
     * Philippe Massonet, CETIC, Belgium
     * Alberto Montresor, University of Bologna, Italy
     * Andrea Omicini, University of Bologna, Italy
     * H. Van Dyke Parunak, Altarum, USA
     * Daniel Polani, University of Hertfordshire, UK
     * Martin Purvis, University of Otago, New Zealand
     * Mikhail Smirnov, Fraunhofer Fokus, Berlin, Germany
     * Paul Valckenaers, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
     * Franco Zambonelli, University of Modena e Reggio Emilia, Italy

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Please submit questions or comments to the ESOA'06 Organizing  
Committee at
/esoa06 (at) altarum.org/


--------------------------
Dr. Salima Hassas
LIRIS-CNRS UMR
Batiment Nautibus,
Universite Claude Bernard Lyon 1
43 boulevard du 11 novembre 1918,
69622 Villeurbanne cedex, France
http://liris.cnrs.fr/salima.hassas
E-mail : salima.hassas@liris.cnrs.fr
Tel : 04 72 44 58 90 (33 4 72 44 58 90 from a foreign country)
Fax : 04 72 43 11 84 (33 4 72 43 11 84 from a foreign country)