Call for Papers & Scope

14th International Workshop on Coordination, Organizations, Institutions, and Norms (COIN@AAMAS 2012)

June 5th 2012

Co-located with the 11th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2012), Valencia Spain

download the call for papers as .txt.

AIMS and SCOPE

The pervasiveness of open systems raises a range of challenges and opportunities for technologies in the area of autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. Open systems comprise loosely coupled entities interacting within a society that usually has some overall measures of quality or efficiency. However, achieving and maintaining a "good" society is difficult to achieve as the participating entities, their modes of interaction or the intended purpose of the system may change over time. Moreover, in the case of open multi-agent systems, the autonomy of the agents can work against the effectiveness of the society. There is therefore a need for tools and techniques for articulating and/or regulating interactions in order to make the system more effective in attaining collective goals, more certain for participants or more predictable.

Coordination, organizations, institutions and norms are four key governance elements for the regulation of open multi-agent systems, and the COIN workshops constitute a space for debate and exploration of these four elements that are central in the design and use of open systems.

We seek to attract high-quality papers addressing mathematical, logical, computational, philosophical and pragmatic issues related to those four aspects; also papers concerned with modelling, animation and simulation techniques for these types of multi-agent systems; as well as papers that discuss tools, prototypes and actual working systems. Papers that present formal treatment of topics as well as those that provide experimental support to claims are welcome. We also encourage authors to report on their experience with systems that have been deployed, applications based on regulated open multi-agent systems, and tools for their development. Of particular interest for the workshop are those papers that articulate a challenging or innovative view.

Without limiting the range of traditional topics addressed in the workshop, in the upcoming edition we would like to challenge the community to submit the latest results in a special purpose track on large-scale multi-agent organizations. To that extend, we broaden the topics of the workshop with the following:

models and implementations of large scale multi-agent organizations;
cloud computing techniques to build large scale multi-agent organizations;
using multi-agent organizations to solve problems in cloud computing.

TOPICS OF INTEREST

Topics of particular interest for COIN@AAMAS2012 will include:

logics, languages and tools for specifying coordination and norms, implementing or simulating organizations and institutions;
law of open multi-agent systems: regulatory compliance, penalty and sanctions, dispute resolution and conflict prevention;
agent societies and communities, social networks, electronic institutions and virtual organizations;
formal lifecycle models: formation, maintenance, evolution and dissolution of organizations, institutions and normative multi-agent systems;
formal methods for specifying coordination and organizational structures; models for verification, validation and visualization;
autonomic institutions and self-organization in multi-agent systems;
frameworks and protocols for organized and organizational adaptation;
mechanisms for governance of common pool resources;
agent environments: physical and institutional resources for physical capability and institutional power;
discovery, openness and inter-operation in organizations and institutions;
mixed human-agent coordination and institutions in virtual worlds;
participatory simulation.
reports on implemented systems.