Aims and scope

Multi-agent systems are often understood as complex entities where a multitude of agents interact, usually with some intended individual or collective goals. Such a view usually assumes some form of organisation, or set of norms or conventions that articulate or restrain interactions in order to make them more effective in attaining those goals, more certain for participants or more predictable. The engineering of effective coordination or regulatory mechanisms is a key problem for the design of open complex multi-agent systems.

In recent years, social and organisational aspects of agency have become a major issue in MAS research specially in applications on Service Oriented Computing, Grid Computing and Ambient Intelligence. These applications enforce the need for using these aspects in order to ensure social order within these environments. Openness, heterogeneity, and scalability of MAS pose new demands on traditional MAS interaction models. Therefore, the view of coordination and control has to be expanded to consider not only an agent-centric perspective but also a societal and organisation-centric views.

The overall problem of analysing the social, legal, economic and technological dimensions of multi-agent organisations provides theoretical and interdisciplinary research questions at different levels of abstraction. Consequently, this workshop provides a space for the convergence of concerns and developments from MAS researchers that have been involved with these issues from the complementary perspectives of coordination, organisations, institutions and norms.

Theme and topics

The topics of interest of the COIN workshop in AAMAS'08 are concerned to Coordination, Organisation, Institutions and Norms in the context of MAS. Relevant topics include, but are no limited to:

1. •Models, ontologies and standards of COIN (Coordination, Organisation, Institutions and/or Norms) for MAS.
   

2. •Social science background for COIN, e.g.: roles, authority, motivation, social power and other social relationships and attitudes.
   

3. •Languages for COIN: expressiveness vs efficiency.
   

4. •Coordination and interaction conventions, technologies and artifacts.
   

5. •Methodologies to develop MAS based on COIN concepts.
   

6. •Software frameworks and tools.
   

7. •Scalability and openness.
   

8. •Simulation, analysis and verification.
   

9. •Industrial applications, case studies, and experimental work.
   

10. •Integration and impact of COIN in other domains, e.g: service oriented computation, intelligent environments, B2B, P2P.
    

Papers describing ongoing work and position papers are welcome.

Submission Procedure and Formatting Guidelines

For preparation of papers to be submitted please follow the instructions for authors available at the Springer LNCS Web page: http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html. The length of each paper including figures and references may not exceed 15 pages. All papers must be written in English and submitted in PDF format.

Submission of a paper should be regarded as an undertaking that, should the paper be accepted, at least one of the authors will attend the conference to present the work.

To upload your paper, use the following link to EasyChair:

http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=coinaamas08.

Proceedings

Proceedings will be available at the workshop. As with previous COIN workshops, selected, revised and extended versions of the papers of the two 2008 editions will be published in a single Springer LNCS volume. The revised versions must take into account the discussion held during the workshop, hence, only those papers that are presented during the workshop will be considered for inclusion in the post-proceedings volume.