International Workshop on
New Paradigms for Multi-Agent Software Engineering (NPMASE)
Organized in colocation with the 19th International Conference on
Principles and Practice of Multi-Agent Systems
(PRIMA 2016)
(URL: http://prima2016.di.unito.it/index.html)
August 22 to 26, 2016, Phuket, Thailand
Introduction:
The software engineering discipline, which is considered the core component of computer science and relevant to other disciplines such as computer and electrical engineering, is mainly related to the analysis and design of software applications. It particularly considers a wide range of traditional and computational paradigms such as procedural, functional, object-oriented and logic programming, service-oriented architecture, and intelligent systems computing. Each paradigm indeed comes with its own models, tools and development techniques along with its own design, verification and testing aesthetic that can encourage and help us think about computation, verification and testing in a different way. For example, service-oriented computing adopts the notion of computer programs as Web services, which can be correctly verified and tested before made them available to customers.
Since the mid-1990s, multi-agent systems have been emerged as a subfield of artificial intelligence and lunched a very active area of research. This research domain is essentially concerned with building computer systems that can effectively cooperate and communicate with each other. A number of researchers began to view and think about agents as a software engineering paradigm and they carried the slogan with the banner saying “computation as interaction”. In the NPMASE workshop, we amend this banner to become “correct computation as interaction”. Indeed, adopting an agent-oriented perspective of software engineering entails conceptualizing computer systems as comprising of groups of interacting semi-autonomous agents. These agents are capable of acting independently or semi-independently in order to fulfill their design objectives or goals delegated by users. The arguments supporting multi-agent software engineering are well known. For example, the key point is to conceptualize certain systems as communities of interacting semi-autonomous agents in a natural way. In these systems, a thread control is inherently distributed over multiple stakeholders (agents) with potentially cooperating or competing interests.
Current challenges:
In order to promote new paradigms for multi-agent software engineering, there are key challenging issues we need to tackle. Specifically, we need to develop the reasonable and right conceptual toolkit that will try to answer a set of questions. First, what are the essential concepts in multi-agent software engineering that we can use in the analysis and design of emerging complex systems? Such concepts will support methodologies needed to analyze, specify, design and develop multi-agent systems and applications. Second, what are the verification techniques that we can use to verify and validate the correctness of designed systems? These techniques may include model checking, theorem proving and abstract interpretation. Third, what are the development platforms and testing techniques that we can use in implementing, testing and deploying multi-agent systems? The NPMASE workshop capitalizes on distributed and intelligent systems that can be applied in a wide range of application domains including: communication network protocols, business protocols, Web service composition, Cloud computing, Grid computing, electronic health services, mobile health monitoring services, aircraft, games, and robots.
Motivations:
While there have been substantial developments in some of the aforementioned application areas since the paradigm of multi-agent software engineering was first mooted in the mid-1990s, there remains potential room to:
· Consider emerging and modern applications.
· Propose new models, tools, techniques, concepts, abstractions, and architectures.
· Prompt future research and development.
The current applications do not mark the end of the story of multi-agent software engineering development. The workshop also aims to:
· Clearly assess where we are so far.
· Identify significant applications employed in various market sectors.
· Foresee what will be the future research directions.
Theme and topic:
The indicated topics of the workshop will incorporate, but not limited to the following:
1- New computing paradigms:
a. Service-oriented computing for multi-agent systems.
b. Agent-based semantic Web and composition.
c. Agent-based Cloud services.
d. Agent-based mobile health services and electronic health services.
e. Agent oriented Grid middleware.
f. Adaptive computing based multi-agent systems.
2- Methodologies, concepts and analysis:
a. Conceptual models and engineering aspects of software agent systems.
b. Review the evolution of multi-agent software engineering.
c. Meta-models of agent-oriented versus meta-models of object-oriented.
d. System analysis and modeling of agent-based systems.
e. Requirements analysis and specification of agent-based systems.
3- Design and process:
a. Design of multi-agent systems architectures.
b. Development of ontologies for multi-agent systems.
c. Development and design of protocols for dialogue games.
d. Verification, validation and testing of multi-agent systems.
e. Maintenance of multi-agent systems.
4- Languages and tools:
a. Agent UML (AUML).
b. Specification languages for reasoning about multi-agent systems.
c. Agent communication languages and multiparty communication.
5- Applications and experiences:
a. Enterprise information systems, organizations and environments.
b. E-government.
c. E-learning.
d. Software IT ecosystems, heating systems and energy distribution systems.
e. E-health.
f. M-health.
g. Games.
h. Industrial control systems.
i. Real-time systems, etc.
j. Internet of Things
Submission of papers:
Manuscript for submission should be written in English and have no more than 10 pages LNCS Springer style. Please see PRIMA 2016 website http://prima2016.di.unito.it/index.html for paper formatting instructions. Electronic version of the papers in PDF, postscript or word files should be sent to the workshop chairs by email before the submission deadline on May 30, 2016.
Important dates:
Deadline for submission: May 30, 2016.
Notification of acceptance: June 15, 2016.
Camera-ready copy of final version: June 30, 2016.
Evaluation of papers:
Each paper will be reviewed by 3 members of an international program committee according to the paper’s technical relevance and quality. The final decision lies in the workshop chairs with consideration of the comments and recommendations made by the program committee members.
Publication of the proceedings:
The organizers are arranging the publication of the post proceedings of PRIMA Workshops as a volume of LNCS/LNAI by Springer. Previous editions have been published in this series. For each accepted paper, at least one of the co-authors is required to register to the conference and present the paper at the workshop. Immediately after the workshop, authors of accepted papers will also be invited to submit a thoroughly revised and expanded version of the paper for final publication.
Workshop Chairs:
Dr. Mohamed El Menshawy
Visiting Professor, Concordia Institute for Information Systems Engineering,
Faculty Engineering and Computer Science,
Concordia University, Montreal, Canada
Email: m.elmenshawy.mohamed@gmail.com
Dr. Mohamed Adel Serhani,
Associate Professor, College of Information Technology,
United Arab Emirates University, Al Ain, UAE
Email: serhanim@uaeu.ac.ae
Program Committee:
Sanja Lazarova-Molnar, University of Southern Denmark, Denmark.
Patrick Girard, Montreal University, Canada.
Wassim Hajj, American University of Beirut, Lebanon.
Valerie Issarny, Inria of Paris, France.
Omar Abdel Wahab, Concordia University, Canada.
Warda El Kholy, Concordia University, Canada.
Faisal AL Saqqar, Concordia University, Canada.
Salah Bouktif, UAE University, United Arab Emirates.
Rabeb Mizouni, Khalifa University, United Arab Emirates.
Amjad Gawanmeh, Khalifa University, United Arab Emirates.
Badidi Elarbi, UAE University, United Arab Emirates.
Abdelghani Benharref, University of Wollongong, United Arab Emirates.
Mohammed Boulmalf, International University of Rabat, Morocco.
May El Barachi, Zayed University, United Arab Emirates.
Younes Lakhrissi, Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah University, Morocco.
Mohammad Mehedy Masud, UAE University, United Arab Emirates.
Asma Obaid Hamad Saeed Subaih Al Falasi, Zayed University, United Arab Emirates.
Hadeel Talaat El Kassabi, UAE University, United Arab Emirates.
Ikbal Taleb, UAE University, United Arab Emirates.
Jerald Yoo, Masdar Institute, United Arab Emirates.
Faheem Ahmed, Thompson Rivers University, Canada.
Marouane Kessentini, University of Michigan-Dearborn, USA.