Engineering Societies in the Agents World IV: 4th International Workshops, ESAW 2003, London, UK, October 29-31, 2003. Revised Selected and Invited Papers

The fourth internationalworkshop,“EngineeringSocietiesin the Agents World” (ESAW 2003) was a three-dayevent that took place at the end of October 2003. After previous events in Germany, the Czech Republic, and Spain, the workshop crossed the Channel, to be held at the premises of Imperial College, London. The steady increase in the variety of backgrounds of contributing sci- tists, fascinating new perspectives on the topics, and number of participants, bespeaks the success of the ESAW workshop series. Its idea was born in 1999 among members of the working group on “Communication, Coordination, and Collaboration” of the ?rst lease of life of the European Network of Excellence on Agent-Based Computing, AgentLink, out of a critical discussion about the general mindset of the agent community. At that time, we felt that proper c- siderationsofsystemicaspectsofagenttechnologydeployment,suchasackno- edgement of the importance of the social and environmental perspectives, were sorely missing: a de?ciency that we resolved should be addressed directly by a new forum. Front Matter....Pages - Emergence of Collective Behaviour and Problem Solving....Pages 1-20 Social Order and Adaptability in Animal and Human Cultures as Analogues for Agent Communities: Toward a Policy-Based Approach....Pages 21-48 Using Swarm Intelligence in Linda Systems....Pages 49-65 Engineering Democracy in Open Agent Systems....Pages 66-80 A Liberal Approach to Openness in Societies of Agents.....Pages 81-92 Welfare Engineering in Multiagent Systems....Pages 93-106 Dynamics of Collective Attitudes during Teamwork....Pages 107-122 Privacy-Aware Mobile Agent: Protecting Privacy in Open Systems by Modelling Social Behaviour of Software Agents....Pages 123-135 Interaction Monitoring and Termination Detection for Agent Societies: Preliminary Results....Pages 136-154 Competition, Cooperation, and Authorization....Pages 155-167 Competent Agents and Customising Protocols....Pages 168-181 Coordination and Conversation Protocols in Open Multi-agent Systems....Pages 182-199 MAS Organization within a Coordination Infrastructure: Experiments in TuCSoN ....Pages 200-216 Adaptability Patterns of Multi-agent Organizations....Pages 217-227 Integrating and Orchestrating Services upon an Agent Coordination Infrastructure....Pages 228-245 Formalizing the Reusability of Software Agents....Pages 246-257 A Design Complexity Evaluation Framework for Agent-Based System Engineering Methodologies....Pages 258-274 Laying Down the Foundations of an Agent Modelling Methodology for Fault-Tolerant Multi-agent Systems....Pages 275-293 Patterns Reuse in the PASSI Methodology....Pages 294-310 Designing Agents’ Behaviors and Interactions within the Framework of ADELFE Methodology....Pages 311-327 Supporting Tropos Concepts in Agent OPEN....Pages 328-345 Dynamic Analysis of Agents’ Behaviour – Combining ALife, Visualization and AI....Pages 346-359 Advancing Profile Use in Agent Societies....Pages 360-375 A Computational Framework for Social Agents in Agent Mediated E-commerce....Pages 376-391 You’ve Got Mail From Your Agent: A Location and Context Sensitive Agent System....Pages 392-409 Back Matter....Pages -

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Engineering Societies in the Agents World, ESAW 2004, held in London, UK in October 2004.

The 23 revised full papers presented were carefully selected during two rounds of reviewing and improvement for inclusion in the book; also included are 2 invited papers by leading researchers in order to round of the coverage of the relevant topics.

The papers are organized in the following topical sections:

- multidisciplinary for agent societies

- coordination, organization, and security of agent societies

- abstractions, methodologies, and tools for engineering agent societies

- applications of agent societies

As explicited in the aims and scope of the "Engineering Societies in the Agents World" workshop, software systems are undergoing drastic changes in scale and complexity, making them more resemble natural systems and societies than mechanical systems and traditional software architectures.