This article introduces the special issue of ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems devoted to research papers arising from the three Technical Forum Group meetings held in 2004 and 2005 that were organized and sponsored by the European FP6 Coordination Action AgentLink III

McBurney, Peter

Omicini, Andrea

Payne, Terry

Petta, Paolo

English

Southampton (e-Prints Soton)

12Introduction to the Special Issue: TheAgentLink III Technical ForumsPAOLO PETTAAustrian Research Institute for Artiﬁcial Intelligence, and MedicalUniversity of ViennaANDREA OMICINIUniversit` a di Bologna a CesenaTERRY PAYNEUniversity of SouthamptonandPETER McBURNEYUniversity of LiverpoolThisarticleintroducesthespecialissueofACMTransactionsonAutonomousandAdaptiveSystemsdevoted to research papers arising from the three Technical Forum Group meetings held in 2004and 2005 that were organized and sponsored by the European FP6 Coordination Action AgentLinkIII.Categories and Subject Descriptors: I.2.11. [Artiﬁcial Intelligence]: Distributed ArtiﬁcialIntelligenceGeneral Terms: Design, Documentation, Economics, Experimentation, Languages, Standardiza-tion, Theory, VeriﬁcationAdditionalKeyWordsandPhrases:AgentLinkIII,autonomousagents,multi-agentsystems,agent-oriented software engineering, technical forums, European researchACM Reference Format:Petta, P., Omicini, A., Payne, T., and McBurney, P. 2007. Introduction to the special issue: theAgentLink III technical forums. ACM Trans. Autonom. Adapt. Syst. 2, 4, Article 12 (November2007), 6 pages. DOI = 10.1145/1293731.1293732 http://doi.acm.org/ 10.1145/1293731.1293732The work presented in this article was supported by the EU FP6 Project AgentLink III (IST-FP6-002006CA). This publication reﬂects only the authors’ views. The EU is not liable for any use thatmay be made of the information contained herein.Author’s address: P. Petta, Austrian Research Institute for Artiﬁcial Intelligence, Freyung 6/6, A1010 Vienna, Austria (EU); email: Paolo.Petta@ofai.atPermission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use isgranted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for proﬁt or direct commercialadvantage and that copies show this notice on the ﬁrst page or initial screen of a display alongwith the full citation. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must behonored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers,to redistribute to lists, or to use any component of this work in other works requires prior speciﬁcpermission and/or a fee. Permissions may be requested from Publications Dept., ACM, Inc., 2 PennPlaza, Suite 701, New York, NY 10121-0701 USA, fax +1 (212) 869-0481, or permissions@acm.org.C   2007 ACM 1556-4665/2007/11-ART12 $5.00 DOI 10.1145/1293731.1293732 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1293731.1293732ACMTransactionsonAutonomousandAdaptiveSystems,Vol.2,No.4,Article12,Publicationdate:November2007.12:2 • P. Petta et al.1. INTRODUCTIONThis special issue of ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systemsis devoted to research papers arising from the AgentLink III Agent Techni-cal Forums. AgentLink III (2004–2005) was a European Union (EU)-sponsoredproject to support research and development in agent-based technologies andto strengthen Europe’s efforts in this domain. It was funded under the Informa-tion Society Technologies (IST) Activity Area of the Sixth Framework Program(FP6), through the Semantic-based Knowledge Systems area (Project number:IST-FP6-002006CA).AgentLink III could build on the success of its predecessors: the originalAgentLink (1998–2001) project coordinated by Mike Wooldridge (then at QueenMary & Westﬁeld College, London), one of the “preparatory, accompanying andsupport measures” funded in the Long Term Research area of FP4, was instru-mental in promoting agent technology in European research and development.Under the coordination of Michael Luck (then at the University of Southamp-ton),theAgentLinkII(2001–2003)FP5“thematicnetworkcontract”wasaimedatconsolidatingtheEuropeanagent-orientedsystemsresearchcommunity,anddeveloped a high-quality technological roadmap describing a vision for the fu-tureandpotentialofagenttechnology.AgentLinkIIIwasanFP6“Co-ordinationAction” led by the University of Liverpool and the University of Southampton,UK, under the direction of a Management Committee comprising academic andindustrial representatives from across the European agent technology commu-nity. To support this leadership, the project established in early 2004 a systemof membership by which institutions active in agent research or developmentcouldapplytojointheproject.Bytheendoftheprojectat31December2005,206organizations from European Union member nations and associated states hadbecome full members of AgentLink III, of which 134 were universities, 32 wereresearch institutes, and 40 were private companies. A further 27 organizationswere accepted as associate members, either because they were located outsideEurope or because they are not yet active in agent research or development.This high level of membership indicated considerable support for the projectfrom European organizations, both public and private.2. AGENTLINK III OBJECTIVESThe long-term goal of AgentLink III was to put Europe at the leading edgeof international competitiveness in the increasingly important area of agenttechnologies. To realize this aim, AgentLink III sought to achieve the followingobjectives:—To gain competitive advantage for European industry by promoting and rais-ing awareness of agent systems technology;—to support standardization of agent technologies and promote interoperabil-ity;—to facilitate improvement in the quality, proﬁle, and industrial relevance ofEuropean research in the area of agent-based computer systems, and drawin relevant prior work from related areas and disciplines;ACMTransactionsonAutonomousandAdaptiveSystems,Vol.2,No.4,Article12,Publicationdate:November2007.Introduction to the AgentLink Special Issue • 12:3—to support student integration into the agent community and to promoteexcellence in teaching in the area of agent-based systems;—to provide a widely known, high-quality European forum in which currentissues,problems,andsolutionsintheresearch,development,anddeploymentof agent-based computer systems may be debated, discussed, and resolved;—to identify areas of critical importance in agent technology for the broaderIST community, and to focus work in agent systems and deployment in theseareas.Further information about AgentLink III and its many activities is availablefrom the AgentLink website at http://www.agentlink.org.13. AGENTLINK III TECHNICAL FORUMSIn order to support coordination and collaboration of European research efforts,AgentLink III established a series of research meetings, called the AgentLinkIII Technical Forums (TFs). Each of these meetings comprised a number of par-allel workshops, called Technical Forum Groups (TFGs), on topics suggested inresponse to a call for proposals issued before each Technical Forum meeting.Soliciting topics for TFGs in this way ensured that the meetings retained ﬂex-ibility, and could reﬂect whatever was the current focus of research attentionin the agents community. This feature also meant that the standard for accep-tance could be quite high, with proposers needing to show evidence of researchcoordination activities before, during, and beyond each TF. Example outcomesof such activities included Web sites and discussion forums, short and long re-ports of the Group meetings at the TF, surveys of activities, and coauthoredsurvey papers of the ﬁeld covered by the TFG.Three TF events were held under AgentLink III:—TF1: Rome, Italy, EU: 30 June–2 July 2004.—TF2: Ljubljana, Slovenia: 28 February–2 March 2005.—TF3: Budapest, Hungary: 15–17 September 2005.Over a hundred participants registered to attend each of the TF meetings,which all turned out to be truly global events, with attendants not just fromthe European Union and afﬁliated countries, but also from the USA, Argentina,Dubai, Japan, and Australia.Each TF supported six to nine TFGs, with many Groups meeting for multipledays. Because AgentLink sought to build links with related research disciplinesand with other research projects, special effort was invested to encourage theformation of TFGs making connections between the agents community andother research communities. For instance, there were TFGs which looked atthe intersection of agent technologies and: the law; biology and bioinformatics;1We are grateful to the University of Southampton for continuing to host this Web site followingthe end of the project.ACMTransactionsonAutonomousandAdaptiveSystems,Vol.2,No.4,Article12,Publicationdate:November2007.12:4 • P. Petta et al.and economics. In addition, joint meetings were held by TFGs and two relatedEU-funded projects,2 KnowledgeWeb and ASPIC.ThediscussionsandcontractsenabledbytheAgentLinkIIITechnicalForumGroups were very productive in generating new research and refereed publica-tions. This output includes a special issue of the Knowledge Engineering Reviewjournal [Omicini and McBurney 2005]; a double special issue of the journal In-formatica[Omicinietal.2005;Omicinietal.2006],aspecialissueofthejournalAutonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems on environments in multi-agentsystems [Parunak and Weyns 2007], and a major research article on standardformats for the exchange of arguments between agents [Ches˜ nevar et al. 2006].The present special issue of ACM Transactions on Autonomous and AdaptiveSystems adds to this impressive list.4. SPECIAL ISSUE CONTENTSThis issue contains four articles which together cover a range of topics in con-temporary agents systems research and applications. The ﬁrst article, Aware-ness in Collaborative Ubiquitous Environments: the Multilayered Multi-AgentSituated System Approach by Marco Locatelli and Giuseppe Vizzari, considersthe application of research results in multi-agent systems to model, design,and engineer collaboration between distinct computational entities in ubiqui-tous environments. In these settings, entities need to maintain awareness ofevents and other dynamic information, and the authors’ model deals with suchawareness explicitly. The rise of ad-hoc wireless networks, the development ofintelligent devices, and the widespread deployment of data sensor networks(such as public closed-circuit television cameras) make the issue of collabora-tion in ubiquitous computing domains an important one.Intelligent devices are increasingly able to provide services to one another,whether freely or in return for some form of payment. How such provisionshould be negotiated between machines connected across distributed systems,suchasthoseofGridnetworks,isthesubjectofthesecondarticle,“AFrameworkforWebServiceNegotiation,”byShamimabiPaurobally,ValentinaTamma,andMichael Wooldridge. These authors apply recent work in multi-agent negotia-tiontechniquestofacilitatedynamicnegotiationforresourcesinGridnetworks,and describe a web services development of the Contract Net protocol for ne-gotiation between insurance companies and vehicle repair ﬁrms. Their articleincludes an empirical evaluation showing the added value of their ﬂexible ap-proach in comparison today’s rigid interactions.Automated interactions between autonomous computer entities represent-ing different commercial organizations has long been part of the vision foragent systems. For that reason, considerable research and development effortin the ﬁeld has been focused on the design of standard languages and protocolsfor agent communications. The third article in this collection, Stefan Poslad’s“Specifying Protocols for Multi-Agent System Interaction,” presents the his-tory of work undertaken by the Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents2Seehttp://knowledgeweb.semanticweb.org/(FP6-507482)andhttp://www.argumentation.org/(FP6-002307).ACMTransactionsonAutonomousandAdaptiveSystems,Vol.2,No.4,Article12,Publicationdate:November2007.Introduction to the AgentLink Special Issue • 12:5(FIPA)3 in developing public standards to support agent interoperability, openservice interaction, and heterogeneous development. He presents the maincharacteristics of the FIPA model of multi-agent interaction and its expectedfuture developments, along with a comparison of the FIPA model to alternativeinteraction standards.While the development of standards for agent communication and inter-actions is essential for commercial deployment, agent technologies will onlyachieve their full potential with the availability of proven agent-oriented soft-ware design and methodologies and engineering tools [Luck et al. 2005]. Theﬁnal article in this special issue, “High Variability Design for Software Agents:Extending Tropos,” written by Loris Penserini, Anna Perini, Angelo Susi, andJohn Mylopoulos, is devoted to one such methodology, Tropos. The authorsintroduce an extension that allows explicit modeling of alternatives, therebyenhancing support for high variability design. The authors also present an im-plemented software development environment for Tropos, based on the Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) framework. An e-commerce case study serves toillustrate the Tropos development process.From looking at these articles, one theme to emerge is the increasing valueof research in the domain of agent technologies in realizing the visions of otherbranches of computing. From ubiquitous and ambient computing to Grid net-works through to the Semantic Web, agent theories, methodologies, and prac-tical experiences are proving to be key enablers for downstream applications.Another theme is the primary role of standards in supporting inter-operabilityand communication between distinct computational entities, created by teamsdecoupled in time and in space, and using a miscellany of software engineeringtools and methods. That software agents can still communicate with one an-otherwhenarchitectedandengineeredundersuchdiverseconditionsisacreditto the overarching agent paradigm and to the interoperability of agent-orientedmethodologies. The need for such methodologies in designing autonomous andadaptive computational systems is a third theme arising from these papers.This picture reinforces the validity of the analysis proposed in Petta and M¨ uller[2006].45. CONCLUSIONSThe article in this volume are the culmination of considerable work from TForganizers, presenters, authors, referees, and journal editors. We wish to thankthe many authors of the papers submitted for this special issue for their con-tributions, and also the referees who took care to read and comment on thesearticles. The special issue could not have happened without these different ef-forts. In addition, we wish to thank all those who made the AgentLink III Tech-nical Forums such noteworthy successes, especially the AgentLink III staff:Catherine Atherton, Becky Earl, Adele Maggs, and Serena Rafﬁn. We alsothank the AgentLink III Management Committee for their efforts and theirsupport, and the local organizers and their staff at each event: Rino Falcone at3Now an IEEE standards committee.4See also http://www.ofai.at/∼paolo.petta/conf/at2ai4/.ACMTransactionsonAutonomousandAdaptiveSystems,Vol.2,No.4,Article12,Publicationdate:November2007.12:6 • P. Petta et al.TF1, Matjaz Gams at TF2, and L´ aszl´ o Zsolt Varga at TF3. We also thank Cris-tiano Castelfranchi (TF1), who along with two of us (AO and PP), chaired theTechnical Forum Committees during 2004 and 2005. Finally, we are grateful tothe European Commission for the ﬁnancial and other support received for theAgentLink III project (IST-FP6-002006CA).We hope you enjoy reading this special issue!REFERENCESCHES˜ NEVAR, C., MCGINNIS, J., MODGIL, S., RAHWAN, I., REED, C., SIMARI, G., SOUTH, M., VREESWIJK,G . ,AND WILLMOTT, S. 2006. Towards an argument interchange format. Knowle. Engine. Rev. 21, 4,293–316.LUCK, M., MCBURNEY, P., SHEHORY,O . ,AND WILLMOTT, S. 2005. Agent Technology: Computing asInteraction. A Roadmap for Agent Based Computing. AgentLink III, the European Co-ordinationAction for Agent-Based Computing, Southampton, UK.OMICINI,A .AND MCBURNEY, P. 2005. The AgentLink III technical forums: Introduction to thespecial issue. Knowle. Engine. Rev. 20, 2, 95–97.OMICINI, A., PETTA,P . ,AND GAMS, M. 2005. Editorial: The second AgentLink III technical forum:Main issues and hot topics in European agent research I. Informatica 29, 4 (November), 377–378.OMICINI, A., PETTA,P . ,AND GAMS, M. 2006. Editorial: The second AgentLink III technical forum:Main issues and hot topics in European agent research II. Informatica 30, 1, 1.PARUNAK,H .V .D .AND WEYNS, D. 2007. Special issue on environments for multi-agent systems.J. Autonom. Agents Multi-Agent Syst. 14, 1, 1–116.PETTA,P .AND M¨ ULLER, J. 2006. Guest editorial: Best of “From Agent Theory to Agent Implemen-tation (AT2AI)–4”. Appl. Art. Intel. 20, 2–4, 99–103.ACMTransactionsonAutonomousandAdaptiveSystems,Vol.2,No.4,Article12,Publicationdate:November2007.

Agent Technology: Computing as Interaction. A Roadmap for Agent Based Computing. AgentLink III, the European Co-ordination Action for Agent-Based Computing,

Editorial: The second AgentLink III technical forum: Main issues and hot topics in European agent research I.

Editorial: The second AgentLink III technical forum: Main issues and hot topics in European agent research II.

Guest editorial: Best of “From Agent Theory to Agent Implementation (AT2AI)–4”.

Special issue on environments for multi-agent systems.

The AgentLink III technical forums: Introduction to the special issue.

Towards an argument interchange format.

Introduction to the Special Issue: The AgentLink III Technical Forums

Introduction to the Special Issue: The AgentLink III Technical Forums

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