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This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Engineering Societies in the Agents World, ESAW 2004, held in London, UK in October 2004. The 23 revised full papers presented were carefully selected during two rounds of reviewing and improvement for inclusion in the book; also included are 2 invited papers by leading researchers in order to round of the coverage of the relevant topics. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: - multidisciplinary for agent societies - coordination, organization, and security of agent societies - abstractions, methodologies, and tools for engineering agent societies - applications of agent societies
E-Book Content
Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence Edited by J. G. Carbonell and J. Siekmann Subseries of Lecture Notes in Computer Science 3071 This page intentionally left blank Andrea Omicini Paolo Petta Jeremy Pitt (Eds.) Engineering Societies in the Agents World IV 4th International Workshop, ESAW 2003 London, UK, October 29-31, 2003 Revised Selected and Invited Papers Springer eBook ISBN: Print ISBN: 3-540-25946-5 3-540-22231-6 ©2005 Springer Science + Business Media, Inc. Print ©2004 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg All rights reserved No part of this eBook may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording, or otherwise, without written consent from the Publisher Created in the United States of America Visit Springer's eBookstore at: and the Springer Global Website Online at: http://ebooks.springerlink.com http://www.springeronline.com Preface The fourth international workshop, “Engineering Societies in the Agents World” (ESAW 2003) was a three-day event that took place at the end of October 2003. After previous events in Germany, the Czech Republic, and Spain, the workshop crossed the Channel, to be held at the premises of Imperial College, London. The steady increase in the variety of backgrounds of contributing scientists, fascinating new perspectives on the topics, and number of participants, bespeaks the success of the ESAW workshop series. Its idea was born in 1999 among members of the working group on “Communication, Coordination, and Collaboration” of the first lease of life of the European Network of Excellence on Agent-Based Computing, AgentLink, out of a critical discussion about the general mindset of the agent community. At that time, we felt that proper considerations of systemic aspects of agent technology deployment, such as acknowledgement of the importance of the social and environmental perspectives, were sorely missing: a deficiency that we resolved should be addressed directly by a new forum. A first focal point was the vision that to tackle the issues inherently connected to the emergent complexity of multi-agent systems (MAS) it would be inevitable to introduce the notion of a society of agents as a first-class entity in the modeling and engineering of MAS. In particular, paying attention to software infrastructure as a location to provide intelligence in MAS, and the notion of social intelligence drove the first ESAW workshop, co-located with ECAI 2000 in Berlin. ESAW 2001, held in Prague together with the by now renowned European Agent Systems Summer School (ACAI’01), reinforced the line of research relating to the design of agent society and underlined further the necessity for methodologies to properly guide the increasingly popular use of social and cognitive concepts in agent theories and technologies. The third workshop in Madrid took advantage of co-location with the workshop series on Cooperative Information Agents (CIA 2002) to set itself apart and gain further in identity by opening up to a yet a wider range of contributing tech