New Schedule - SELMAS'2002

[EXT-Marco . Mamei]

[<<Change in Venue & Extended Deadlines>> This call has been sent
to several distribution lists, our apologies if you receive multiple
copies of this announcement.
Please forward this announcement to anybody who you think may be
interested.]


****************************************************************************** 
 
                         --- CALL FOR PAPERS --- 
 
                        International Workshop on
        SOFTWARE ENGINEERING FOR LARGE-SCALE MULTI-AGENT SYSTEMS
                               (SELMAS 2002) 
 
                         Orlando, Florida - USA 
                              May 19, 2002 
                  In conjunction with the ICSE 2002
            (Int'l Conference on Software Engineering) 
 
         http://www.teccomm.les.inf.puc-rio.br/selmas2002/ 
 
****************************************************************************** 

Motivation and Goals
================

The development of multi-agent systems introduces additional complexity to the 
system modeling, design and implementation, and consequently increases the 
probability of manifestation of heterogeneous exceptional situations, security 
pitfalls and so on. In addition, as the agent paradigm is devoted to the 
development of complex distributed systems, a large-scale multi-agent system 
encompasses multiple types of agents, each of them having distinct agency 
properties, and it needs to satisfy multiple stringent requirements such as 
reliability, security, adaptability, interoperability, scalability, 
maintainability, and reusability. However, many existing agent-oriented 
solutions are far from ideal; in practice, they are often built in an ad-hoc 
manner and are error-prone, not generally applicable, not scalable, and not 
dynamic. The main goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers and 
practitioners to discuss the current state and future direction of research in 
software engineering for large-scale multi-agent systems. Other particular 
interests of this workshop are:

(i) determine the overlap and integration of object-oriented software 
engineering and agent-based software engineering,

(ii) understand those issues in the agent technology that difficult or improve 
the production of large-scale distributed systems, and

(iii) provide a comprehensive overview of existing software engineering 
techniques that may successfully be applied to deal with the complexity 
associated with realistic multi-agent software.

Topics of Interest
=============

The workshop is intended to cover wide ranges of topics of software engineering 
for large-scale multi-agent systems, from theoretical foundations to empirical 
studies. We encourage authors to present novel ideas, critique of existing 
work, and practical studies and experiments, which demonstrate how software 
engineering techniques can assist the development of large-scale multi-agent 
systems. We welcome the submission of papers in all aspects of agent-multi 
software engineering, including (but are not restrict to) the following:

- Comparative studies between multi-agent and OO systems
- Lessons learned in agent-based software construction
- Experiments and case studies
- Advanced separation of concerns
- Design patterns, design principles, and architectural styles
- Frameworks and software architectures
- Meta-level software architectures
- Coordination technologies, infrastructures, and tools 
- Domain-specific languages
- Requirements engineering 
- Software reliability engineering
- Fault-tolerance techniques 
- Practical coordination and cooperation frameworks
- Software testing, verification and validation techniques
- Software development environments
- Analysis and design methodologies
- System modeling and metrics
- UML application

Workshop Format and Submissions
===========================

The format of the workshop will combine presentations on submitted position 
papers and focused discussion groups. It is the aim of the organizers to 
publish the proceedings of the workshop (including presented papers and 
summaries of discussions) in journal or book form. Attendance at the workshop 
is by invitation, and will be limited to facilitate lively discussion and the 
exchange of ideas. Prospective participants should submit electronically a 
position paper (between 2 and 5 pages) in PDF format to Alessandro Garcia 
(address@hidden).

Important Dates
============

=> Deadline for submission: March 7, 2002
=> Accept/Reject notification: April 4, 2002
=> Workshop: May 19, 2002

Workshop Organizers
================

Alessandro Garcia, PUC-Rio - Brazil 
Carlos Lucena, PUC-Rio - Brazil 
Jaelson Castro, UFPE - Brazil  
Andrea Omicini, University of Bologna - Italy   
Franco Zambonelli, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia - Italy

Program Committee
=================

Alexander Romanovsky (University of Newcastle - UK)
Anand Tripathi (University of Minnesota - USA)   
Awais Rashid (Lancaster University - UK)
Carlos Angel Iglesias Fernandez (Politechnic University of Madrid - Spain) 
Cecília Rubira (UNICAMP - Brazil) 
Christina Chavez (UFBA - Brazil)
Ciaran Bryce (University of Geneve - Switzerland) 
Dan Marinescu (University of Central Florida - USA) 
Donald Cowan (University of Waterloo - Canada)
Eric Yu (University of Toronto - Canada)
Gerd Wagner (Eindhonven University of Technology - The Netherlands)
Gerhard Weiss (Technical University of Munich - Germany)
James Odell (OMG - USA) 
Jie Xu (University of Durham - UK)
Julio Leite (PUC-Rio - Brazil)
Katia Sycara (Carnegie Mellon University - USA)
Liz Kendall (Monash University - Australia)
Marco Mamei (University of Modena and Reggio Emilia - Italy) 
Marcus Fontoura (IBM Almaden Research Center - USA)
Mark d'Inverno (University of Westminster - UK)
Martin Fredriksson (Blekinge Institute of Technology - Sweden)
Mike Wooldridge (University of London - UK)
Mohamed Fayad (University of Nebraska - USA) 
Nick Jennings (Southampton University - UK) 
Ruy Milidiú (PUC-Rio - Brazil)
Simon Stobart (University of Sunderland - UK)
Van Parunak (Altarum Institute - USA)


                  ==================================
   Swarm-Modelling is for discussion of Simulation and Modelling techniques
   esp. using Swarm.  For list administration needs (esp. [un]subscribing),
   please send a message to <address@hidden> with "help" in the
   body of the message.
                  ==================================