The EMAS REPORT has been submitted to the ACM SEN

EMAS 2018 motivation and aims

According to many scientists working in the AI field, one way to describe AI is as the study of agents that receive percepts from the environment and perform actions. The main unifying theme underlying AI is then the idea of an intelligent agent able to reason, act, interact, learn (see Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig, “Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach”, 2009). This metaphor makes intelligent agents appealing not only for the AAMAS audience, but also for the IJCAI-ECAI and ICML ones. In particular the EMAS workshop aims at being appealing for those researchers and practitioners interested in the theory and practice of engineering intelligent agents, i.e. in theories, architectures, languages, platforms, methodologies for designing, implementing, running intelligent agents.

Despite the substantial body of knowledge and expertise developed in the design and development of multi-agent systems (MAS), the systematic development of large-scale and open MAS still poses many challenges. Even though various languages, models, techniques and methodologies have been proposed in the literature, researchers and developers are still faced with fundamental questions attaining their engineering, such as:

• How to express the requirements for large-scale and open MAS and how to translate these requirements into agent goals?
• Which architectures are most suitable for MAS of different domains?
• How to seamlessly integrate AI and machine learning techniques into design/programming languages and tools for agent-based systems?
• How to specify, design, implement, verify, test, validate and evolve MAS?
• How to enable agent-based systems to deal with continuous change, for example in the operating environment or user requirements?
• How to ensure/control global behavior of decentralized MAS?
• How to seamlessly integrate MAS engineering with mainstream engineering models, languages, frameworks and tools?
• What are the implications of MAS engineering in the context of continuous development and deployment?
• What is the synergy between Cloud and Edge computing on the one hand and MAS engineering on the other hand?
• How to scale with the complexity of real-world application domains?How can MAS help developing Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet-of-Things? Which development tools and frameworks are available/needed? Which processes and methodologies can integrate the above and provide a disciplined approach to rapid yet high-quality development of MAS?

EMAS 2018 aims to gather researchers and practitioners in the domains of agent-oriented software engineering, programming multi-agent systems, declarative agent languages and technologies, machine learning, and AI in general, and AI and machine learning to present anddiscuss their research and emerging results in MAS engineering. The overall purpose of this workshop is to facilitate the cross-fertilization of ideas and experiences in the various fields to:

1. Enhance our knowledge and expertise in MAS engineering and improve the state-of-the art;
2. Define new directions for MAS engineering that are useful to practitioners, relying in results and recommendations coming from different but continuous research areas;
3. Investigate how practitioners can use or need to adapt established methodologies for the engineering of large-scale and open MAS;
4. Involve more master and PhD students.

We highlight three novelties for EMAS 2018:

1. EMAS will organise a joint panel with the Goal Reasoning Workshop providing the opportunity to the attendees to address the topic of “Requirements and Goals for Agent-based Systems: From Specification and Design to Runtime Representation and Reasoning.”
2. EMAS will organise a junior track providing an opportunity to Master and PhD students to present their ongoing research project.
3. EMAS will organise a tool, testbed, and demonstration session where attendees can present novel results on these artefacts.

Authors of accepted papers will be invited to submit revised and extended versions of the EMAS papers for inclusion in the post-proceedings that will be published as a volume in Lecture Notes in Computer Science.

The EMAS workshop has been held as part of AAMAS since 2013 and was affiliated to AAMAS through AOSE, ProMAS, DALT since the inception of these earlier workshops. EMAS 2018 will appeal to any researcher or practitioner who is interested in the theoretical and practical aspects of agents and MAS engineering.