Motivation
Although much progress has been made, the design, implementation and deployment of multi-agent systems still poses many challenges. Some of these concern design and software engineering aspects, for example, how to effectively design agents and their interactions? Other challenges concern implementation, for instance, how to effectively implement multi-agent coordination or organisations? Further challenges concern use of logic-based techniques for verification of agent systems.
It is increasingly apparent that there are benefits in considering design and implementation challenges together. For example, design artefacts can be used to support and assist with debugging and testing. Another example is the development of agent-oriented programming languages that result in programs that are more readily verifiable. A final example is the use of declarative techniques that span design and implementation. This unveils a tight interlacement among the different research issues in multi-agent systems engineering.
This naturally results in a workshop that brings together the currently separate topics (but overlapping communities) that focus on software engineering aspects (AOSE), programming aspects (ProMAS), and the application of declarative techniques to design, programming and verification (DALT).
Furthermore, EMAS is an ideal place for papers on innovative applications of agents. In particular, there is a great interest from the EMAS community in having people who have developed applications articulate the lessons learned and engineering challenges identified in building and deploying their applications.
Goals and Topics
The EMAS workshop explicitly pursues three goals:
- To progress and further develop the understanding of how to engineer multi-agent systems.
- To bring together the communities that are concerned with different aspects of engineering multi-agent systems, and by doing so, allow for better interchange of ideas between the communities, thus exploiting synergies discussed above.
- To attract workshop papers that describe innovative applications
We thus call for research papers that are concerned with any aspect of the engineering of multi-agent systems. Specifically including any topics that would fall within the scope of one or more of the three parent workshops:
- Agent-Oriented Software Engineering,
- Declarative Agent Languages and Technologies,
- Programming Multi-Agent Systems.
Application Papers
We also seek application papers that describe developed applications. Such papers should not just describe an application, but also the lessons learned and the engineering challenges identified in building and deploying the applications.