Workshop Aims and Scope

Multi-Agent Based Simulation (MABS) is a vibrant inter-disciplinary area which brings together researchers active within the agent-based social simulation community (ABSS) and the multi-agent systems community (MAS). The focus of ABSS is on simulating and synthesizing social behaviours in order to understand real social systems (human, animal and even electronic) via the development and testing of new concepts. The focus of MAS is on the solution of hard engineering problems related to the construction, deployment and efficient operation of agent based systems.

Increasingly however - and this was evidenced at AAMAS'02 - the MAS and ABSS communities have much to learn from each other. Real human societies are generally self-organising, highly scalable, robust and open systems. The ABSS community have developed a sizable set of techniques, observations and models that give insight into sufficient mechanisms underpinning these kinds of systems. However, ABSS has not concerned itself with applying these techniques to solve engineering problems. Conversely, the MAS community is concerned with creating working agent systems that solve real problems. This focus has forced  many to abandon experimentation with large scale systems (thousands of agents) composed of smart autonomous agents (i.e. complex adaptive learners) due to lack of traditional techniques (and or computational resources) for managing such complexity.

These differences of emphasis often preclude dialogue between ABSS and MAS workers. MABS workshops have a track record of providing a major forum for such dialogue to occur. The work presented in various sections of the AAMAS'02 main conference demonstrated a keen interest in the use of learning and adaptation combined with large scale agent societies - increasingly sociological issues of cooperation, trust and power hierarchies are being broached from the engineering perspective. The ABSS community is maturing, techniques and results are increasingly being independently reproduced and verified (but still rarely applied to the production of working MAS). Also some empirical social scientists have begun to demonstrate, test and validate concepts using experimental data and ABSS - and in this context MABS offers a potential linkage (shared vocabulary and methodology) between social scientists and MAS workers - this was an issue explicitly raised during AAMAS'02 panel discussions.

At MABS'03 we aim to aim to re-focus the MABS workshop back to its original aim by challenging the ABSS community to propose MAS applications of their work (or programmes towards such applications) and by asking the MAS community to specify open problems in MAS that they feel should be solvable given a deeper understanding of social organization and processes. We encourage therefore, MAS people to challenge ABSS people by demanding new concepts and techniques to solve real problems and those working in ABSS to offer to MAS workers techniques and methods in a form that makes sense to agent engineers.

As well as original work in ABSS and MAS we particularly welcome submissions which identify open MAS problems that might be solvable by the application of ABSS techniques (and vice versa). We also welcome programmatic overviews which propose a way forward for MABS. We strongly encourage all papers to (at least briefly) discuss the relevance of their results to both the ABSS and MAS communities.

• Techniques to help produce scalable and robust agent societies
• Managing interactions in large-scale (possibly massive) agent societies
• The establishment and maintenance of functionality in open agent systems
• The emergence of cooperation and coordinated action
• Social structures and norms as tools for designing MAS
• The application of ABSS techniques to MAS task domains
• The application of MAS techniques to ABSS task domains
  
• Methodologies and techniques that link ABSS and MAS work
• Agent-based models of social behaviour (particularly those that inform MAS)
• Formal models of social processes applicable to MAS
• Emergence as an MAS programming paradigm (how to control it, when to apply it)
• Emergent specialisation and group level adaptations
• Comparison of different agent architectures within a simulated MAS task environment
• The application of biologically inspired ideas and techniques to MAS
• The effect of different kinds of cognition of the global outcomes in MAS/ABSS
• The use of MAS/ABSS to understand complex dynamics
• Visualisation and analytic tools to understand MAS outcomes
• Philosophical critiques of MABS
• New frameworks for the conceptualisation of MABS
• New tools and methodologies for producing ABSS
• Work which builds on or critiques past MABS papers

Previous MABS Workshops

Important Dates

• Paper submission deadline extended: March 28^th. Papers should be e-mailed to dave@davidhales.com by midnight (GMT) on the 28^th of March. Papers must be in either MS-WORD, POSTSCRIPT (using standard fonts) or PDF format. Papers should be in LNCS format (see http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html) and no more than 16 pages in that format.  If there are any problems with this you must email dave@davidhales.com well before the deadline has passed.
• Notification of acceptance: May 8^th. Authors will be notified of acceptance along with peer reviewer comments on 8^th of May. Acceptance may be conditional on suggested revisions.
• Pre-proceedings deadline: May 19^th. Revised versions will be required by midnight on 19^th of May. These versions will be published in the workshop pre-proceedings which will be available to each participant at the workshop event in Melbourne.
• Workshop event: 8:30am to 5:00pm on 14^th July 2003 - Sofitel, Melbourne, Brisbane Room (First Floor). 

Workshop Schedule

Note: These times are provision and almost CERTAIN to change! Watch this page for updates.
           Each talk will be allocated approx. 30 mins in total (20-25 mins for presentation and 5-10 mins for questions).
           Workshop location is: Sofitel, Melbourne, Brisbane Room (First Floor).

8:30am Welcome and Brief Introduction - David Hales (Centre for Policy Modelling, Manchester)

Session 1 - MABS Techniques for MAS (Chair: David Hales)

8:40am Invited Talk: Engineering Emergent Behaviour: A Vision
Giovanna Di Marzo Serugendo (University of Geneva, Switzerland)

9:10am Employment Decisions Supporting Organizations of Autonomous Agents
Foster McGeary and Keith Decker (Computer and Information Sciences, University of Delaware, USA)

9:35am Towards Verification and Validation in Multiagent-Based Systems and Simulations: Analyzing Different Learning Bargaining Agents
Keiki Takadama, Yutaka L. Suematsu, Norikazu Sugimoto, Norberto E. Nawa and Katsunori Shimohara (Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan, ATR Human Information Science Labs, Kyoto, Japan, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Nara, Japan)

10:00am - 10:30am Coffee break

10:30am Weak Interaction and Strong Interaction in Agent Based Simulations
Fabien Michel, Abdelkader Gouaich and Jacques Ferber (LIRMM Laboratoire d'Informatique, Robotique et Micro-electronique de Montpellier, C.N.R.S. - Universite Montpellier II, France)

Session 2 - Economics, Exchange and Influence in Virtual Worlds (Chair: Juliette Rouicher)

11:00am Using Qualitative Exchange Values to Improve the Modelling of Social Interactions
Maria Ribeiro Rodrigues and Antionio Carlos da Rocha Costa (PPGC - Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul and ESIN - Universidade Catolica de Pelotas, Brazil)

11:30pm Bilateral Tradings with and without Strategic Interaction
Shinji Tomita and Akira Namatame (National Defence Academy, Yokosuka, 239-8686, Japan)

12:00pm Monetary Policy and Banks' Loan Supply Rules to Harness Asset Bubbles and Crashes
Ichiro Takahashi and Isamu Okada (Faculty of Economics and Faculty of Business Administration, Soka University, Tokyo, Japan)

12:30pm Social change: exploring design influence
Ricardo Sosa and John S Gero (Key Centre of Design Computing and Cognition, University of Sydney, Australia)

1:00pm - 2:00pm Lunch break

Session 3 - MABS Techniques for Real World Modelling (Chair: Emma Norling)

2:00pm A Methodology for Eliciting and Modelling Stakeholders’ Representations with Agent Based Modelling
Nicolas Becu, François Bousquet, Olivier Barreteau, Pascal Perez, and Andrew Walker (CIRAD, Montpellier, France, Cemagref, Montpellier, France, IRRI, Bangkok, Thailand, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University, Canberra)

2:30pm Modelling a European decision making process with heterogeneous public opinion and lobbying: the case of the authorization procedure for placing Genetically Modified Organisms on the market
Juliette Rouchier and Sophie Thoyer (GREQAM / CNRS, Marseille, France and LAMETA, ENSAM-INRA, Montpellier, France)

3:00pm - 3:30pm Coffee break

3:30pm Evaluation of Usability of Dial-a-Ride Systems by Social Simulation
NODA Itsuki, OHTA Masayuki, SHINODA Kosuke, KUMADA Yoichiro and NAKASHIMA Hideyuki (Cyber Assist Research Center, AIST, Japan and School of Information Science, Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology)

4:00pm Multi-Agent Simulation and Interdisciplinary Research: Switching Between Models
Maria Bruno Marietto, Nuno David, Jaime Simão Sichman and Helder Coelho (Intelligent Techniques Laboratory, University of São Paulo Brazil, Dept. of Information Science and Technology, ISCTE/DCTI, Lisbon, Portugal, Dept. of Informatics, University of Lisbon, Portugal)

4:30pm Wrap-up Summary and Goodbye (Round table discussion if there is time: "A killer application for MABS?")

Publication

Organizing Committee

Program Committee