First Call for Papers: ATOP at AAMAS2008

[Klaus Fischer]

[Please accept our apologies if you receive multiple postings.]

			       Call for Papers

		  Agent-based Technologies and applications
		       for enterprise interOPerability
				  ATOP 2008

		  (http://www-ags.dfki.uni-sb.de/~kuf/atop)

			  Workshop to be held at the
		  Seventh International Joint Conference on
	     Autonomous Agents & Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2008)
		    (http://gaips.inesc-id.pt/aamas2008/)

			      Estoril, Portugal

			     12 or 13th May 2008
				   
MOTIVATION

Today's enterprises operate in a dynamic environment which is characterized by
global  outsourcing, shrinking  product life-cycles,  and unstable  demand. To
prosper  in  this  environment,  enterprises  face a  growing  need  to  share
information and  to collaborate  with each  other at all  levels of  the value
chain.    As  organizations   are  gradually   transforming   into  "networked
organizations",  interoperability becomes  the main  challenge to  realize the
vision  of  seamless business  interaction  across organizational  boundaries.
Interoperability  problems occur at  different levels:  at the  business level
(how organizations do business together, what needs to be described and how?),
at the  knowledge level (different  formats, schemas, and ontologies),  and at
the level  of the underlying information and  communication technologies (ICT)
and systems.

Agent  technologies  provide  a  cross-cutting approach  promising  to  enable
intelligent  and  proactive   automation,  adaptive  planning  and  execution,
decentralized coordination,  and semantic interoperability.   The Model-Driven
Architecture  (MDA)   is  another  promising  approach  for   the  support  of
interoperability  due  to  its  promise  of  providing  consistent  models  at
different  abstraction  layers with  well-defined  mappings  in between  these
layers.  As  a third thread  of activity Service-Oriented  Architectures (SOA)
try  to reach  interoperability, focusing  upon,  but not  restricted to,  the
information and  communication technology (ICT) level.   The main contribution
and  goal  of  SOA  is  to  achieve loose  coupling  among  software  entities
representing business objects (processes, organizational units, etc.).

Agents, MDA, and SOA provide complementary solution components to parts of the
enterprise interoperability problems.  Agents enable dynamic collaboration and
orchestration   in  changing  and   unpredictable  situations;   MDA  provides
mechanisms  that generate  artifacts  for different  platforms;  SOA gives  us
late-binding  interoperability  between   business  process  requirements  and
providers of service implementations. It  is unlikely, then, that any of these
approaches   will   succeed   stand-alone   in   achieving   the   degree   of
interoperability that  will be necessary  to successfully construct,  run, and
optimize networked organizations.   It is rather likely that  a combination of
these  basic  technologies  will  evolve  in  the next  years  to  provide  an
appropriate  basis  for  interoperability.   Therefore the  workshop  aims  at
bringing together  researchers and fostering interaction  and collaboration to
work jointly on solutions to achieve interoperability.

The  workshop  focuses  on   technologies  that  support  interoperability  in
networked organizations, on successful applications of these technologies, and
on lessons  learned.  The main  goal is to  stimulate a discussion on  how far
agent technologies can support interoperability in this context and to compare
current  trends   in  the  development  of  agent   technologies  with  recent
developments in  service-oriented and model-driven system  design with respect
to their  ability to solve interoperability  problems.  Regarding model-driven
system design the presentation and  discussion of metamodels of the underlying
technologies  like   for  example  agent   technologies  and  service-oriented
architectures is especially of interest.

WORKSHOP TOPICS

We  would like  to focus  the  ATOP 2008  around modeling  and metamodels  for
interoperability  in agent-based  systems and  business  applications. Ideally
submitted  papers  should  deal   with  model-driven  agent  technologies  and
methodologies in the context of:

     * simulation and validation of business systems
     * decision-support in value creation networks
     * enterprise and business process modeling
     * case studies of implemented interoperability solutions and
       systems
     * coordination and negotiation in distributed business networks
     * cross-organizational business processes
     * normative environments for enterprise agents interoperability
     * decentralized and peer-to-peer models and enactment of
       business processes
     * goal-driven and adaptive business process management
     * semantic annotations of business process descriptions
     * intelligent enterprise application integration
     * business process modeling, enactment and integration
     * intelligent execution, monitoring, management, and optimization
       of business processes
     * service-oriented architectures and related topics like service
       choreography, orchestration, composition, brokering, and mediation
     * autonomic computing and adaptive autonomous architectures
     * model-driven architectures for business processes and systems
     * models and meta-models for agent-based systems
     * platform-independent models and their relation to agent models
     * model-to-model and model-to-text transformations
     * knowledge representations and ontologies in the context of
       (collaborative) business processes
     * agent communication languages and standards
     * self-organization and adaptation in the context of interoperable systems

The discussion  of agent  technologies is recommended  as it relates  with the
interoperability  objective.  However, a  proposal  of  new, preferably  model
driven, techniques  or technologies  to increase interoperability  of business
applications  without direct  reference to  agent technologies  is acceptable,
too.  Still   it  is  recommended  that   such  work  should   be  related  to
agent-oriented  approaches   if  such  approaches   already  exist.  Workshops
specializing in some of the topics mentioned in the above list will be held at
AAMAS 2008.  Authors of papers that  are dealing with such topics without much
discussion of  interoperability aspects are encouraged to  submit their papers
to  the more  specialized  workshops.  The  workshop  organizers will  closely
collaborate in the evaluation  of the papers.  Therefore, multiple submissions
do not increase the chance of a paper to be accepted.

SUBMISSION DETAILS

Authors  should submit  original research  papers  (must not  exceed 12  pages
including all figures and tables) including  an abstract of about 200 words or
position  papers  (must  not  exceed  3  pages). In  any  case  submission  of
preliminary  abstracts some time  before the  official submission  deadline is
very much appreciated. All submissions must be sent electronically to

			    Klaus.Fischer at dfki.de

Acceptable formats  are PDF  and PostScript.  It  is planned to  structure the
workshops into  invited talks, technical presentations  and panel discussions.
A  publication of  selected  workshop  papers is  planned  in Springer's  LNAI
series.       Formatting      instructions      can      be      found      at
http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html    and   should    be   strictly
followed. The first  page should include the full name  and contact details of
at least one author (email and full postal address).

IMPORTANT DATES

Submissions due              January 25 2008
Notifications sent           February 25 2008
Final papers due             March 5 2008
Workshop                     May 12 or 13 2008

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

Arne-Jorgen Berre, SINTEF, Norway
Klaus Fischer, DFKI, Germany
James Odell, Oslo Software, USA
Joerg P. Mueller, Technische Universitaet Clausthal, Germany

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Sahin Albayrak, TU Berlin, Germany
Bernhard Bauer, University Augsburg, Germany
Amit Chopra, NC State University, USA
Michael Georgeff, Monash University, Australia
Axel Hahn, University Oldenburg, Germany
Christian Hahn, DFKI, Germany
Oystein Haugen, SINTEF, Norway
Timo Kahl, IWi, Germany
Stefan Kirn, Hohenheim University, Germany
Renato Levy, IAI, USA
Margaret Lyell, IAI, USA
Saber Mansour, Oslo Software, France
Michele Missikoff, LEKS; IASI-CNR, Italy
Eugenio Oliveira, University of Porto, Portugal
Herve Panetto, University Nancy, France
Omer Rana, Cardiff University, UK
Ralph Ronnquist, Intendico Pty. Ltd., Australia
Rainer Ruggaber, SAP, Germany
Omeir Shafiq, Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), Austria
Carles Sierra, IIIA, Spain
Leon Sterling, Melbourne University, Australia
Hiroki Suguri, Comtec, Japan
Joerg Ziemann, IWi, Germany
Ingo Zinnikus, DFKI, Germany