ATOP 2011

Call for Papers 2011

Agent Technologies for Business Applications and Enterprise Interoperability

To be held at
Thirteenth International Conference on ELECTRONIC COMMERCE
(ICEC 2011)

Liverpool, UK

August 2 2011

Motivation

Today's enterprises must adapt their software processes to work in open settings, such as online marketplaces and, more generally, the Web, where business relationships exhibit a high degree of dynamism. Agent technologies can help networked enterprises to more flexibly achieve their objectives. Agents can directly support businesses by taking active parts in productive supply chains. This can mean that agents efficiently search for and efficiently provide information. Agents can directly support the execution of business process based on the same descriptions that are used in more traditional work flow engines. The inclusion of mobile devices which ask for ad hoc and peer to peer networks on the one hand let the clear boarders of former enterprises disappear and ask for even more autonomy on both the mobile devices and the more stationary infrastructure in the core of the enterprise. Both sides offer a fruitful environment to further develop agent technologies. Such open settings are characterized by the autonomy and heterogeneity of the enterprises. In such settings, collaboration, distributed decision-making, and interoperability is a key concern: how do we ensure - at different levels - that diverse enterprises can work together toward a mutually desirable end?

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) and more recently, cloud-based architectures (CBA), try to reach interoperability, focusing upon, but not restricted to, the information and communication technology (ICT) level. The main contribution and goal of SOA/CBA is to achieve loose coupling among software entities representing business objects (processes, organizational units, etc.).

Agents, MDA, and SOA/CBA 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/CBA gives us virtualization and 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 foster interaction and collaboration to work jointly on new technologies and solutions for agent-oriented business collaboration, decision support, and interoperability.

Workshop Topics

The workshop focuses on technologies that support collaboration, decision support, and interoperability in networked organizations, on successful applications of these technologies, and on lessons learned. The main goal is to stimulate a discussion on how 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, presentation and discussion of metamodels of the underlying agent-based technologies are of interest. 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

Submitted papers should present original work advancing on these topics (agent-oriented architectures, methods, protocols, technologies, or methodologies) with a clear perspective towards applying and validating it in business applications, with a focus - but not necessarily restricted - to collaboration, decision-support, and interoperability issues. Authors of papers that are dealing with technical topics without relating them to agent-related aspects, or agent-oriented papers without reference to business applications or enterprise interoperability are encouraged to submit their papers to more specialized workshops.

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 DOT Fischer AT dfki DOT 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 LNBIP series. Formatting instructions can be found at http://www.springer.com/series/7911 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

Organizing Committee

Klaus Fischer, DFKI, Germany (main contact, email Klaus DOT Fischer AT dfki DOT de )
Joerg P. Mueller, Technische Universität Clausthal, Germany
Renato Levy, Intelligent Automation, Inc, Rockville, USA

Program Committee

Bernhard Bauer, University Augsburg, Germany
Dominic Greenwood, Whitestein Technologies, Switzerland
Axel Hahn, University Oldenburg, Germany
Christian Hahn, Saarbrüstahl AG, Germany
Oystein Haugen, SINTEF, Norway
Mark Hoogendoorn, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands
Mario Lezoche, University Nancy, France
Margaret Lyell, IAI, USA
Nikolay Mehandjiev, Universtity of Manchester, UK
Eugenio Oliveira, University of Porto, Portugal
Herve Panetto, University Nancy, France
Omer Rana, Cardiff University, UK
Ralph Ronnquist, Intendico Pty. Ltd., Australia
Ingo Timm, Goethe-University Frankfurt/Main, Germany
Joerg Ziemann, Talanx AG, German
Ingo Zinnikus, DFKI, Germany

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