Special Issue: Hot Topics in European Agent Research II Guest Editors: Andrea Omicini Paolo Petta Matjaž Gams EDITORIAL BOARDS, PUBLISHING COUNCIL
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Volume 30 Number 1 January 2006 Special Issue: Hot Topics in European Agent Research II Guest Editors: Andrea Omicini Paolo Petta Matjaž Gams EDITORIAL BOARDS, PUBLISHING COUNCIL Informatica is a journal primarily covering the European com- Editorial Board puter science and informatics community; scientific and educa- Suad Alagic´ (USA) tional as well as technical, commercial and industrial. Its basic Anders Ardo (Sweden) aim is to enhance communications between different European Vladimir Bajic´ (South Africa) structures on the basis of equal rights and international referee- Vladimir Batagelj (Slovenia) ing. It publishes scientific papers accepted by at least two ref- Francesco Bergadano (Italy) erees outside the author’s country. In addition, it contains in- Marco Botta (Italy) formation about conferences, opinions, critical examinations of Pavel Brazdil (Portugal) existing publications and news. Finally, major practical achieve- Andrej Brodnik (Slovenia) ments and innovations in the computer and information industry Ivan Bruha (Canada) are presented through commercial publications as well as through Wray Buntine (Finland) independent evaluations. Hubert L. Dreyfus (USA) Editing and refereeing are distributed. Each editor from the Jozo Dujmovic´ (USA) Editorial Board can conduct the refereeing process by appointing Johann Eder (Austria) two new referees or referees from the Board of Referees or Edi- Vladimir A. Fomichov (Russia) torial Board. Referees should not be from the author’s country. If Janez Grad (Slovenia) new referees are appointed, their names will appear in the list of Hiroaki Kitano (Japan) referees. Each paper bears the name of the editor who appointed Igor Kononenko (Slovenia) the referees. Each editor can propose new members for the Edi- Miroslav Kubat (USA) torial Board or referees. Editors and referees inactive for a longer Ante Lauc (Croatia) period can be automatically replaced. Changes in the Editorial Jadran Lenarciˇ cˇ (Slovenia) Board are confirmed by the Executive Editors. Huan Liu (USA) The coordination necessary is made through the Executive Edi- Suzana Loskovska (Macedonia) tors who examine the reviews, sort the accepted articles and main- Ramon L. de Mantras (Spain) tain appropriate international distribution. The Executive Board Angelo Montanari (Italy) is appointed by the Society Informatika. Informatica is partially Pavol Návrat (Slovakia) supported by the Slovenian Ministry of Science and Technology. Jerzy R. Nawrocki (Poland) Each author is guaranteed to receive the reviews of his article. Franc Novak (Slovenia) When accepted, publication in Informatica is guaranteed in less Marcin Paprzycki (USA/Poland) than one year after the Executive Editors receive the corrected Gert S. Pedersen (Denmark) version of the article. Karl H. Pribram (USA) Luc De Raedt (Germany) Executive Editor – Editor in Chief Dejan Rakovic´ (Serbia and Montenegro) Anton P. Železnikar Jean Ramaekers (Belgium) Volaricevaˇ 8, Ljubljana, Slovenia Wilhelm Rossak (Germany) [email protected] Ivan Rozman (Slovenia) http://lea.hamradio.si/˜s51em/ Sugata Sanyal (India) Walter Schempp (Germany) Executive Associate Editor (Contact Person) Johannes Schwinn (Germany) Matjaž Gams, Jožef Stefan Institute Zhongzhi Shi (China) Jamova 39, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia Oliviero Stock (Italy) Phone: +386 1 4773 900, Fax: +386 1 219 385 Robert Trappl (Austria) [email protected] Terry Winograd (USA) http://ai.ijs.si/mezi/matjaz.html Stefan Wrobel (Germany) Xindong Wu (USA) Deputy Managing Editor Mitja Luštrek, Jožef Stefan Institute [email protected] Publishing Council: Tomaž Banovec, Ciril Baškovic,ˇ Andrej Jerman-Blažic,ˇ Jožko Cuk,ˇ Vladislav Rajkovicˇ Executive Associate Editor (Technical Editor) Drago Torkar, Jožef Stefan Institute Jamova 39, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia Board of Advisors: Phone: +386 1 4773 900, Fax: +386 1 219 385 Ivan Bratko, Marko Jagodic,ˇ [email protected] Tomaž Pisanski, Stanko Strmcnikˇ Informatica 30 (2006) 1–1 1 The Second AgentLink III Technical Forum: Main Issues and Hot Topics in European Agent Research — Part 2 1 Introduction Self-Organisation in MAS (TFG-SELFORG) – Self-Organisation and Emergence in MAS: An Together with the previous edition, the present number of Overview, by Giovanna Di Marzo Serugendo, Marie- Informatica presents topics out of the leading edge of Euro- Pierre Gleizes, and Anthony Karageorgos, aims at pean research in agent-oriented systems. The contributions defining the concepts of self-organisation and emer- collected in this double special issue originated in the pre- gence, and also at providing a state-of-the-art survey sentations and discussions at and surrounding the Second about the different classes of self-organisation mech- AgentLink III Technical Forum (AL3-TF2) hosted by the anisms applied in the MAS domain. Jozef Stefan Institute in Ljubljana, Slovenia, from February 28 to March 2, 2005. We refer the interested reader to the – Bio-inspired Mechanisms for Artificial Self-organised companion issue (29(4)) for details on AgentLink III, a Eu- Systems, by Jean-Pierre Mano, Christine Bourjot, ropean Commission (EC)-sponsored Coordination Action Gabriel Lopardo, Pierre Glize, analyses three forms of aimed at supporting and strengthening European research biological self-organisation (stigmergy, reinforcement and development in agent-based technologies. mechanisms and cooperation), and discusses some The double special issue includes both, broader survey case studies to show how they could be transposed to papers on different research areas, as well as hot topic artificial systems. articles complementing the critical characterisation of the consolidated achievements with deeper analyses and some – On Self-Organising Mechanisms from Social, Busi- fresh ideas, thereby conveying an impression of the liveli- ness and Economic Domains, by Salima Hassas, Gio- ness of (still much needed!) research in this technological vanna Di Marzo Serugendo, Anthony Karageorgos area of ever-growing importance. and Cristiano Castelfranchi, discusses examples of The first number of the double special issue includes arti- socially-inspired self-organisation approaches, as well cles from the areas of Agent-Oriented Software Engineer- as their use to build socially-aware, self-organising ing and the emerging research topic of Environments for computational systems. Multiagent Systems. The contributions in the present issue – Applications of Self-Organising Multi-Agent Systems: cover three additional areas (for which the short names of An Initial Framework for Comparison, by Car- the AgentLink Technical Forum Groups pursuing the re- ole Bernon, Vincent Chevrier, Vincent Hilaire and 1 search efforts are again given in parentheses , as follows. Paul Marrow, provides MAS examples where self- organisation is used to solve complex problems, along Multiagent Resource Allocation (TFG-MARA) with a number of criteria for comparison of self- organisation between different applications. – Issues in Multiagent Resource Allocation, by Yann Chevaleyre, Paul E. Dunne, Ulle Endriss, Jérôme Lang, Michel Lemaître, Nicolas Maudet, Julian Pad- Acknowledgements get, Steve Phelps, Juan A. Rodríguez-Aguilar, and Paulo Sousa, surveys some of the most salient issues We would like to repeat our thanks to the AL3-TF2 TFG in Multiagent Resource Allocation, an emerging area Chairs for their exemplary efforts that most bespeakingly of research at the interface of Computer Science and reflect the enthusiasm and thrust in European research in Economics. their areas. The lasting result of AgentLink III would not have been possible without the dedication of its staff, the impeccable work of the Management Committe, and the Programming Multi-Agent Systems (TFG-PROMAS) infinite and patient support provided by Catherine Ather- ton, Becky Earl, Adele Maggs and Serena Raffin. We also – A Survey of Programming Languages and Plat- wish to thank once again the local organisers and their staff forms for Multi-Agent System, by Rafael Bordini, at the Jozef Stefan Institute in Ljubljana, Slovenia, who al- Lars Braubach, Mehdi Dastani, Amal El Fallah- lowed us to implement the many lessons learned with the Seghrouchni, Jorge J. Gomez-Sanz, João Leite, Gre- previous technical forum. gory O’Hare, Alexander Pokahr and Alessandro We hope you enjoy this second part of the double special Ricci, surveys the most recent research on program- issue of Informatica: please do consider it an open invita- ming languages and development tools for MASs. tion to join the efforts described! 1Further information about AgentLink III Techni- cal Fora is available from the AgentLink website at http://www.agentlink.org/activities/al3-tf/. Andrea Omicini, Paolo Petta and Matjaž Gams 2 Informatica 30 (2006) 1–1 A. Omicini, P. Petta, M. Gams Informatica 30 (2006) 3–31 3 Issues in Multiagent Resource Allocation Yann Chevaleyre LAMSADE, Université Paris-Dauphine (France) E-mail: [email protected] Paul E. Dunne Department of Computer Science, University of Liverpool (UK) E-mail: [email protected] Ulle Endriss ILLC, Universiteit van Amsterdam (The Netherlands) E-mail: [email protected] Jérôme Lang IRIT, Université Paul Sabatier, Toulouse (France) E-mail: [email protected] Michel Lemaître ONERA, Centre de Toulouse (France) E-mail: [email protected] Nicolas Maudet LAMSADE, Université Paris-Dauphine (France) E-mail: [email protected] Julian Padget Department of Computer Science, University of Bath (UK) E-mail: [email protected] Steve Phelps Department of Computer Science,