Call for Papers

Download the Call for Papers in pdf and txt format.

Scope

Multi-agent systems (MAS) such as formal organizations, electronic institutions and computational economies, often have to adapt in order to reflect, among others, environmental, social and economic changes in them.
Adaptation may take place in several levels. For example, the environment may need to be reorganised by introducing or removing new resources. Changes in the environment may cause the existing members of the MAS to be re-organized: existing members leave the MAS, new agents are introduced, or the current members are allocated to different roles. The roles themselves may be the subject of adaptation. In this case, the eligibility conditions for occupying a role, and/or the permissions, obligations, authorities, entitlements, responsibilities, institutional powers, and other normative positions that are associated with a role, are subject to adaptation.
A new specification of a MAS may unintentionally emerge from the local interactions of its members, or it may be the result of more organized activities. In the latter case, for instance, institutionally empowered agents, such as the board of directors of a multi-agent organization, may decide to consider a series of proposals for improving the efficiency of the organisation.
Group decision-making is an important issue in the design and development of adaptive MAS: how should agents form a decision on adaptation? In the above example, the board of directors may take a vote on the proposals for adaptation, or a negotiation or argumentation may take place concerning these proposals. In less democratic systems it may be up to a single agent to decide whether or not a system should be adapted.
Given that a system has been adapted in some way (new agents were introduced to the system, roles were re-allocated, the specification of roles has changed, and so on), it may be desirable to evaluate the effects of adaptation. For instance, a domain-specific metric space model may be employed in order to calculate the distance of the current point of specification of a MAS from the desired specification point or region of the system evaluator. Similarly, we may calculate the time that it takes a system to converge to a desired specification region, the time that a system stays in that region, the effectiveness of alternative decision-making for adaptation, and so on.

We welcome high-quality, original contributions that address some or all of the issues raised above, with a focus on organized adaptation, as opposed to unintended, emergent modification of a MAS.

Topics of interest therefore include, but are not limited to:

• Organizational models of adaptive MAS.
• Methodologies for analysis, design and development of adaptive MAS.
• Formal models of norm (policy, law) change
  • norm revision, merging of norms, norm conflict detection, norm update, norm creation, the roles of constitutive and regulative norms in norm change.
• Practical engineering issues of norm (policy, law) change
  • norm conflict detection, norm update.
• Protocols and procedures for carrying out adaptation
  • when may an adaptation procedure take place, what may be subject to adaptation, who 'controls' the adaptation procedure, adaptation negotiation, argumentation about adaptation, voting on adaptation, opinion formation concerning adaptation.
• Cooperative human-agent models of adaptation.
• Evaluating methods of adaptation in a MAS.
• Simulations of adaptive MAS.
• Real-world applications of adaptive MAS.
• Scalability in adaptive MAS.
• Legal implications of adaptation.
• Agent architectures for adaptive MAS
  • preference, goal, desire, intention change and norm change.