[agents] CFP: ATOP2011 at ICEC2011

[Klaus.Fischer at dfki.de]

			       Call for Papers

 Agent Technologies for Business Applications and Enterprise Interoperability 
				  ATOP 2011
		  (http://www-ags.dfki.uni-sb.de/~kuf/atop)

			  Workshop to be held at the
	  Thirteenth International Conference on ELECTRONIC COMMERCE
				 (ICEC 2011)
		 (http://icec11.csc.liv.ac.uk/ICEC_2011.html)

			 Liverpool, UK 2 August 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.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 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

Submissions due		May	9,	2011
Notifications sent	June	9,	2011
Final papers due	June	22,	2011
Workshop		August	2,	2011

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

Klaus Fischer,		DFKI,	   	       			Germany
Joerg P. Mueller,	Technische Universitaet Clausthal,	Germany
Renato Levy,		Intelligent Automation, Inc.,		USA

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Bernhard Bauer,		University Augsburg,			Germany
Dominic Greenwood,	Whitestein Technologies,		Switzerland
Axel Hahn,		University Oldenburg,			Germany
Christian Hahn,		Saarstahl AG,	   			Germany
Oystein Haugen,		SINTEF,					Norway
Mark Hoogendoorn	Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam		Netherlands
Margaret Lyell,		Intelligent Automation, Inc.,		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,	  			Germany
Ingo Zinnikus, 		DFKI,					Germany