The Workshop on Service-Oriented Computing and Agent-Based Engineering (SOCABE'2006)

http://www.ict.swin.edu.au/conferences/socabe2006/

to be held at

The Fifth International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents & Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS'2006)

8 - 12 May 2006, Hakodate, Japan

http://www.fun.ac.jp/aamas2006/

The purpose of this workshop is to discuss the recent and significant developments in the general area of Service-Oriented Computing and Software Agents and to promote cross-fertilization of techniques. In particular, we hope to identify techniques from MAS research that will have the greatest impact on automating service-oriented application construction and management, as well as on critical challenges, such as ensuring quality of service, reliability and security.

Call for Papers

We are currently experiencing a paradigm shift in the way business applications are designed, architected, delivered and consumed, so as to better support interoperability and dynamism in meeting changing business needs. Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) is an emerging paradigm for distributed computing and e-business processing that utilizes services as fundamental elements to enable building agile networks of collaborating business applications distributed within and across organizational boundaries. The visionary promise of SOC is a world where application components are assembled with little effort into a network of loosely coupled services to create dynamic business processes and agile applications spanning organizations and computing platforms.

Services are self-contained, platform-independent computational elements that can be described, published, discovered, orchestrated and deployed for the purpose of developing distributed applications across networks such as the Internet. Current approaches include Web services, Semantic Web services, and Grid services, which are used to build distributed applications on the Web, Semantic Web, and Grid, respectively. The development of industry standards, products, and tools for supporting services-based system development is proceeding at a very rapid rate. Standards exist for service discovery (UDDI), description (WSDL), coordination (BPML, BPEL4WS, WSCI), and communication (SOAP). But despite all the efforts on SOC research and development, many businesses are still struggling with how to deploy their core business competencies as a collection of services on the Web and the Grid.

While a service need not fulfil all characteristics of a strong definition of agency, the SOC approach to building complex software systems bears many similarities to the engineering process of a collection of software agents. In particular, large systems are assembled from distributed heterogeneous software components providing specialized services and communicating using agreed-upon protocols. Similarly to certain multi-agent engineering paradigms, the design process of such systems focuses on the declarative characterization of the agents' capabilities and on a message-based paradigm of interoperation.

Also similarly to multi-agent systems, management of service provision processes is dynamic and distributed, and takes into account requirements both at the level of individual services and the system-wide level of the composed application. Management of service discovery, composition and agreement negotiation, and execution of the composed services aims at ensuring the collective functionality and end-to-end quality of service, and needs to be adaptive in response to the changing requirements, services and exceptions in the dynamic Web and Grid environments.

The area of Service-Oriented Computing offers much of real interest to the Multi-Agent System community, including similarities in system architectures and provision processes, powerful tools, and the focus on issues such as quality of service, security and reliability. Similarly, techniques developed in the MAS research community promise to have a strong impact on this fast growing technology.

The Service-Oriented Computing and Agent-Based Engineering (SOCABE) workshop continues the theme of the previous SOCABE workshop held at AAMAS'05 and the WSABE workshops held at AAMAS'03 and AAMAS'04, with an expanded theme reflecting the breadth of issues associated with the Service-Oriented Computing paradigm.

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The purpose of this workshop is to discuss the recent and significant developments in the general area of Service-Oriented Computing and Software Agents and to promote cross-fertilization of techniques. We seek original and high quality submissions that apply multi-agent research to Web service frameworks and vice versa in innovative and interesting ways.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Architectures and infrastructure for distributed agent- or service-oriented frameworks
• Agent-based modelling and design techniques in service-oriented system development
• Multi-agent techniques for describing, organizing, and discovering services
• Process modelling and planning for service/agent composition, orchestration and coordination
• Security support for agents and services, and agent-based approaches to service security
• Intelligent matchmaking, service brokering and service level agreement negotiation
• Services and the Semantic Web, including initiatives such as OWL-S
• Deployment, packaging, and distribution of services and software agents
• Agent-based quality of service management
• Intelligent services and service agents
• Agent and service interoperability and integration
• Functional and non-functional aspects of agents and services
• Agent-based service business models and applications (e.g. in e-Business, e-Science, Enterprise, Telecom etc.)

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Two types of submissions are available: regular submissions of length 3000-4000 words (approx. 8-12 printed pages) and position papers of length 1200-2000 words (approx. 4-6 printed pages). Position papers (and some regular papers) may be presented as part of themed discussion panels; preference may be given to position papers that take strong or challenging positions on important emergent topics.

Full papers must not exceed 15 pages and follow the author instructions of Springer-Verlag that can be found at http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html. All papers should be in Adobe portable document format (PDF) or PostScript format (PS). Authors should submit a full paper via electronic submission to imueller@ict.swin.edu.au.

Submissions will be peer-reviewed by multiple reviewers. Selection criteria will include: relevance, significance, impact, originality, technical soundness, quality of presentation. Some preference may also be given to papers which address emergent trends or important common themes, or which enhance balance of workshop topics.

Since this is associated with the AAMAS conference, accepted papers must be of real relevance to the multi-agent research community.

Accepted papers will be made available in electronic form prior to the workshop and a printed collection will be available at the workshop. The best papers from the previous SOCABE2005 workshop are being selected for publishing with Springer LNCS, and the former WSABE2003 workshop formed the basis of a volume in Kluwer's MASA Series (http://www.wkap.nl/prod/s/MASA); the proceedings of SOCABE2006 may also be used as basis of a published volume, subject to appropriate quality.

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The workshop format will be designed to foster discussion and developing action outcomes on key issues of MAS research related to SOC. We plan one or two invited presentations and panels discussing the current state of play of engineering and management of services-oriented applications involving more complex issues, such as transactions, quality of service and security. The accepted presentations will be grouped into topic areas, with short presentations followed by panels by the presenters to discuss specific questions and issues.

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As per the call for proposals, the workshop will adhere to the specified deadlines for submission and notification.

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