Post-Proceedings

The post-proceedings volume of the 7th International Workshop on Engineering Multi-Agent Systems (EMAS 2019) is now available as Springer LNCS volume 12058

7th International Workshop on Engineering Multi-Agent Systems (EMAS 2019)

According to many scientists working in the AI field, AI can be described as the study of agents that receive percepts from the environment and perform actions. This workshop aims at being appealing for those researchers and practitioners interested in the theory and practice of engineering intelligent agents, i.e. in theories, architectures, languages, platforms, methodologies for designing, implementing, running intelligent agents.

Despite the substantial body of knowledge and expertise developed in the design and development of multi-agent systems (MAS), the systematic development of large-scale and open MAS still poses many challenges. Even though various languages, models, techniques and methodologies have been proposed in the literature, researchers and developers are still faced with fundamental questions attaining their engineering, such as:

  • How to specify MAS:
    • How to express the requirements for large-scale and open MAS and how to translate these requirements into agent goals?
  • How to design and implement MAS:
    • Which architectures are most suitable for MAS of different domains? 

    • How to ensure global behaviour of decentralised MAS
    • How to enable agent-based systems to deal with continuous change, for example in the operating environment or user requirements?
    • What is the impact of the Cloud on MAS engineering?
    • How to integrate AI and machine learning techniques into design/programming languages and tools for agent-based systems? 

    • How can MAS help develop Autonomous Systems, Cyber-Physical Systems, Smart Manufacturing Systems, and Smart buildings and spaces (including Internet-of-Things)?
  • How verify, test, and/or otherwise validate MAS:
    • How can the behaviour of decentralised MAS be validated
    • How to validate MAS that use machine learning.
  • How to evolve MAS:
    • What are the implications of MAS engineering in the context of continuous development and deployment?
  • Which processes, methodologies and tools are needed to integrate the above and provide a disciplined 
approach to rapid yet high-quality development of MAS:
    • How to integrate MAS engineering with mainstream engineering models, languages, frameworks and tools?
    • How to scale with the complexity of real-world application domains? 


EMAS 2019 aims to gather researchers and practitioners in the domains of agent-oriented software engineering, programming multi-agent systems, declarative agent languages and technologies, and AI and machine learning to present and discuss their research and emerging results in MAS engineering. The overall purpose of this workshop is to facilitate the cross-fertilization of ideas and experiences in the various fields to:

  1. Enhance our knowledge and expertise in MAS engineering and improve the state or-the art; 

  2. Define new directions for MAS engineering that are useful to practitioners, relying in results and recommendations coming from different but continuous research areas; 

  3. Investigate how practitioners can use or need to adapt established methodologies for the engineering of large-scale and open MAS; 

  4. Encourage masters and PhD students, to become involved in and contribute to the area.

The EMAS workshop has been held as part of AAMAS since 2013 and was affiliated to AAMAS through AOSE, ProMAS, DALT since the inception of these earlier workshops. EMAS 2019 will appeal to any researcher and practitioner who is interested in the theoretical and practical aspects of agents and MAS engineering.

Workshop Format

The duration will be two days, as in previous editions. 
We plan to have technical sessions with discussion sessions, two invited speakers and one panel. The technical sessions will be organized around the topics that emerge from the submissions. Besides podium time for presentations, we plan to have dedicated time for discussion, possibly in break out sessions. Among the technical sessions, we plan to dedicate one to graduate and PhD students, presenting and discussing their work, including case studies with practical demos. 
Invited speakers for both days will be asked to provide their perspective on engineering principles for the development of real-world MAS.