Multi-agent Systems:

Decentral approaches for designing, organizing, and operating information systems

Conference track at
Multikonferenz Wirtschaftsinformatik 2010
(MKWI10)

Göttingen, February 23-25, 2010.

News

Introduction

Current trends such as globalization of markets and enterprises, global outsourcing, and the formation of global partnerships as virtual networks (e.g., for product development or supply chain management) pose new challenges to IT: How can today’s information systems be made to effectively and efficiently support such complex, dynamic cross-enterprise networks and processes? How can they benefit from the new opportunities created by new IT paradigms and technologies such as the Internet of Things, and the emerging communities and marketplaces of Web 2.0, implying usage scenarios that cannot reasonably be supported solely by centrally organized architecture, design methods, and runtime platforms?

While decentral approaches have a considerable potential for the development, organization, and operation of future information systems, there are barriers and boundaries to their usage as well. Still today, the vast majority of enterprise information systems are based on centralized architectures; under the guise of IT consolidation, data centers and corporate IT departments often replace and centralize formerly decentralized systems. Where decentralized systems are used, basic requirements such as data consistency and efficiency, process coordination, but also issues of trust and security including the management of roles, rights, and users still provide challenges and require further research.

This track will especially address the following questions related to decentralization in information systems:

• What opportunities do today´s decentralized architectures, concepts, and methods create for the modeling, organization, and automation of complex cross-enterprise business processes?
• What methodologies and organization principles for designing such systems are instrumental to appropriately balance the trade-offs between central and decentral elements?
• What runtime components and platforms are required to support the operation and control of decentrally organized information systems?
• What new models, methods, and technologies are required to allow decentralized information systems to realize their potential benefits?
• Where are specific advantages, but also disadvantages and trade-offs of decentral approaches in different classes of business applications?

Goals and Topics

• MAS2: Multi-Agent Systems as Middleware and Architectures for Business Systems, and
• Decentralism as a design principle: Application concepts and methodologies for decentralized information systems.

As the track title suggests, the technology focus of the track will be in the area of multi-agent systems as a promising paradigm for distributed computing, where systems are described by collections of autonomous entities (agents) that interact and coordinate their activities towards a common goal or in a shared environment. Multi-agent systems offer important concepts and technical solutions for the analysis, design and construction of decentralized systems, as they provide a conceptual and technological foundation and core building blocks for autonomous distributed systems such as communication, conflict resolution, cooperation, negotiation, and concurrency. The track shall, however, also study related distributed IT paradigms including peer-to-peer computing, grid systems, and Web 2.0 with respect to decentralization issues and their relationship to the multi-agent approach.

We invite original, high-quality contributions in the broad area of multi-agent systems and related decentralized approaches for designing, organizing, and operating information systems. This includes (but is not limited to) the following topics:

• Decentral IT Paradigms and Architectures
• Agent-based architectures
• Peer-to-Peer and Web 2.0
• Autonomic and organic computing
• Grids and service architecture
• Decentral semantic information management
• Decentral application concepts and applications
• Decentral coordination and collaboration
• Decentral concepts in business process management and monitoring
• Ambient Intelligence / Internet of Things
• Technology and application scenarios
• Practical examples, experience reports, lessons learned
• Decentral middleware and runtime platforms
• Standards
• Agent-based languages and platforms
• P2P protocols and platforms
• Distributed semantic web
• Platforms for decentral resource allocation, coordination, and negotiation
• Event-driven systems
• Data-driven systems
• Decentral modeling and design methodologies and tools
• Engineering Decentral Systems
• Decentral information systems: limitations and tradeoffs
• Self-organization and evolution
• Model-driven approaches
• Top-down vs. bottom-up modeling and design approaches
• Organizational modeling

Important dates

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