[agents] CFP Agent Based Simulation for a Sustainable Society @ PRIMA 2011 (renewed!)

[Frank Dignum]

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FOR PAPERS
Agent Based Simulation for a Sustainable Society
Workshop at PRIMA 2011
Wollongong, Australia 14 or 15 November 2011
ict1.tbm.tudelft.nl/absss2011/
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Important dates:
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* Paper submission: 12 August
* Acceptance notification: 16 September
* Early registration deadline: 27 September
* Camera-ready papers due: 30 September
* Registration deadline: 1 November
* Workshop date: 14 or 15 November
* PRIMA conference: 16-18 November

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Workshop Goals:
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Agent based social simulation has been around for quite some time now. 
It has been successful in a number of areas. Policies for sustainable 
development require complex decisions about resource management, balance 
of economic, environmental and societal needs and involve many 
countries, interest groups and individuals. Especially for sustainable 
societies we are interested in simulations that can capture the 
behavioral patterns, changes and interactions in a society. This 
requires large scale simulations with relatively rich cognitive agents. 
Current approaches to the study of sustainable environments and 
communities focus on either individuals as the causal unit, particularly 
with regard to psychological adjustment, or on macro-economic aspects. 
Macro-models do not provide the instruments to evaluate a policy at the 
micro-level of implementation and are not able to handle highly dynamic 
or volatile situations. On the other hand, micro-models of individuals 
and groups, as used at the lower levels of abstraction, usually based on 
agent models for emergent global behavior, such as Agent Based Social 
Simulation (ABSS), don’t provide means to specify and regulate normative 
global restrictions. However, the societies being modeled in policy 
making relate to real people with real needs and personalities, often of 
a multi-cultural composition. Those circumstances require the agents to 
be diversified to accommodate these facts.
One can see sustainable societies as complex systems, which requires 
that modeling approaches offer ways of accounting for their "necessary 
complexity". By "necessary complexity", we mean the ability to maintain, 
in a model, some characteristics of the target system (such as emergent 
properties, multi-scale interactions, heterogeneity, etc) that can be 
essential in evaluating a decision or making predictions. In that 
respect, agent-based approaches to the modeling of complex systems 
promise to become one of the most pervasive techniques in the next years.
Many issues come up in this context and submissions are invited to 
discuss these issues, including:
* What is the influence of current norms and values of a society on the 
way it reacts to sustainability issues?
* Can we device policies that take this into account and achieve 
socially optimal situations?
* How do we balance rich and complex agents and interactions and large 
scale simulations?
* How can we choose the aspects that should be included in the 
simulation in order for the simulation to be useful for policy makers?
* How to make effective use of participatory, collaborative modeling and 
simulation
* Can we zoom in and out to particular areas in a simulation? E.g. look 
at a street level simulation and zoom out to a nationwide simulation 
including that street? I.e. use multiple scales and multiple agent-based 
simulations?
* What kind of agent platforms are best suited for this kind of agent 
based simulations?
* How to represent time and space?

We encourage participants to submit a paper (15 pages max), describing 
their work on one or more of the topics mentioned above.
Please use the LNCS format for formatting your paper.

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Submission procedure:
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PRIMA-2011 workshops will published publish in a joint volume in the 
LNAI series, Springer. Papers should thus be in Springer LNCS format and 
no more than 15 pages in length. They should be submitted as a PDF file 
and must include the author's name(s), affiliation, complete mailing 
address and email address.
ABSSS2011 submissions will be reviewed by 3 PC members.
Submissions must be done through the Easychair system: 
https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=absss2011
The deadline for receipt of submissions is August, 12, 2011. Papers 
received after this date will not be reviewed.

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Organizing Committee
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* Frank Dignum, Utrecht University
* Virginia Dignum, Delft University of Technology
* Liz Sonenberg, The University of Melbourne
* Yoshi Kashima, The University of Melbourne
* Sarah Hickmott, RMIT
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Program Committee:
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* Carole Adam	(University of Grenoble, FR)
* Frank Dignum	(Utrecht University, NL)
* Virginia Dignum (Delft University of Technology, NL)
* Alexis Drogoul	(IRD, UPMC, MSI-IFI, VIE)
* Raphael Duboz	(AIT, THA)
* Bruce Edmonds (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK)
* Claude Garcia	(Institut Français de Pondichéry & CIRAD, IND)
* Benoit Gaudou	(University of Toulouse, FR)
* Nigel Gilbert 	(University of Surrey, UK)
* Hiromitsu Hattori (Kyoto University, JP)
* Ho Tuong Vinh	(UMI UMMISCO, IRD, IFI,VIE)
* Gertjan Hofstede (Wageningen University, NL)
* Yoshi Kashima 	(University of Melbourne, AUS)
* Nicolas Marilleau (UMI UMMISCO, IRD, FR)
* Peter McBurney (Kings College, London)
* Yuu Nakajima	(Kyoto University, JP)
* Craig Pearson 	(University of Melbourne, AUS)
* Jens Pfau 	(University of Melbourne, AUS)
* Dirk van Rooy 	(Australian National University, AUS)
* David Scerri	(RMIT, AUS)
* Alex Smajgl	(CSIRO, AUS)
* Liz Sonenberg	(University of Melbourne, AUS)
* Leon Sterling	(Swinburne University, AUS)
* Tiberiu Stratulat (Polytech Montpellier, FR)
* Sung-Bae Cho	(Yonsei University, KOR)
* Patrick Taillandier (University of Toulouse, FR)
* The Duy Bui	(Vietnam National University, VIE)