News

• Apr 10, 2014: The detailed workshop program can be downloaded here (pdf).
• Mar 22, 2014: The workshop program with links to the accepted papers are available; follow the 'Program' link.
• Mar 4, 2014: We apologize for the delay with the notifications. We are completing the discussions. Authors will be notified on Wednesday 5th of March at the latest.
• Feb 24, 2014: Authors will be notified on Monday 3th of March.
• Jan 11, 2014: Oguz Dikenelli will talk about Semantic (Big) Data, Agents and Agent Environments at E4MAS.
• Dec 23, 2013: Adelinde Uhrmacher will talk about From Modeling To Experiments - Simulation in the Context of Agent Environments at E4MAS.
• Dec 12, 2013: Juan A. Rodriguez-Aguilar will talk about Decentralizing e-Institutions, and Carlos Carrascosa will talk about Agent Environments in Agreement Technologies at E4MAS.
• Dec 6, 2013: Franco Zambonelli will talk about Infrastructures for Self-aware and Adaptive Services at E4MAS
• Nov 27, 2013: website launched
• Nov 5, 2013: Springer will publish the proceedings of E4MAS in an LNCS volume  

Introduction

In 2004, researchers in multi-agent systems became more and more aware that agent systems consist of more than only agents. The E4MAS workshop that was organized in conjunction with AAMAS 2004 emerged from this awareness. The driver for E4MAS 2004 was the following statement announced at the workshop website: There is a general agreement in the multi-agent research community that agent environments are essential for multi-agent systems, yet researchers neglect to integrate the agent environment as a primary abstraction in their models and tools for multi-agent systems.

During three successful editions of E4MAS and various additional activities, a substantial group of researchers worked intensively on the subject of agent environments. One of the primary outcomes of this endeavor was a principled understanding that the agent environment should be considered as a primary design abstraction, equally important as the agents. Different models and architectures have been proposed to design agent environments, and these designs have been validated in a variety of application domains. A special issue on agent environments in the Journal on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems in 2007 included a set of influential papers that define the role of agent environments, their engineering, and outline challenges in the field. The challenges have been the drivers for numerous follow up research efforts.

The goals of this special edition of E4MAS are:

• To reflect on the past 10 years of research and engineering on agent environments for multi-agent systems;
• To investigate to what extent the challenges identified a decade ago have been tackled;
• To outline challenges for future research on a short and longer term.

Proceedings will be published in a Lecture Notes in Computer Science volume.