Apologies for multiple copies.

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CALL FOR PAPERS

The Second International Workshop on
Engineering Emergence in Decentralised Autonomic Systems
EEDAS 2007
http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~distrinet/events/eedas/2007/
eedas (at) cs.kuleuven.be

Jacksonville, Florida, USA
to be held in conjunction with
The Fourth IEEE International Conference on
Autonomic Computing (ICAC'07)
June 11-15, 2007

Supported by IEEE Computer Society and ACM

Important Dates

Paper submission deadline: * 01 March 2007*
Paper notifications: * 30 March 2007*
Camera ready paper: * 13 April 2007*
Workshop date: *11-15 June 2007*

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WORKSHOP THEME
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Autonomic Computing addresses the need for systems to cope with and
manage complex, highly dynamic, and changing operating conditions
autonomously. Furthermore, many modern computing systems effectively
operate in a decentralised fashion, adding an extra layer of
complexity to the management (or even the prediction) of global
system behaviour. Autonomic Computing arguably addresses one aspect
of the problem (autonomous operation of individual units) but doesn't
inherently guarantee the emergence of the desired collective
behaviour in systems where central or global control is impossible
for one or several of the following reasons:

* The information needed to make decisions is inherently
localised and cannot be gathered centrally (e.g. ad-hoc
networks).
* A highly dynamic context implies that, even when information is
gathered centrally, it is obsolete when it reaches the manager.
* The amount of processing required to orchestrate the system
operation is beyond the capability of any participating unit.
* The centrally computed global solution cannot be practically
implemented.
* Short response time is more critical than efficiency (quick,
local reaction to events is better than a globally optimised
but delayed solution).

Self-organising emergence is an approach to engineering decentralised
systems so as to make them capable of dynamically adapting to changes
without external intervention. The global functionality dynamically
arises from the local autonomous decisions and interactions between
individual entities based on local information usually communicated
through local channels (long-range diffusion being typically achieved
via "gossiping"). These entities are not explicitly aware of the
resulting global behaviour. The lack of global or central control
implies the need to design decentralised coordination mechanisms and
the local rules governing individual behaviour with the explicit
objective to take full advantage of emergent properties.

The ultimate challenge in engineering fully decentralised autonomous
systems is to find a disciplined approach to foster globally coherent
and desired system behaviour. Many research issues are still open,
mainly because of the lack of a clear step-plan to map the desired
global behaviour onto a specific set of local decision and
interaction rules. As a result, exploitation of emergent behaviour in
system design is still in its infancy. This workshop aims at
gathering research results that could contribute to addressing this
challenge.

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TOPICS
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Particular research topics include, but are not limited to:

Foundation:
* Theories, models, and decentralised mechanisms for
self-organising and emergent behaviour
* Comparison of typically central/hierarchical autonomic
computing versus self-organising emergent approaches
* Biologically, sociologically, and economically inspired
interaction mechanisms: stigmergy, swarm intelligence, markets…
* Robustness, Stability and Dependability of self-organising
emergent systems
* Contextual and/or environmental awareness in
self-organising emergent systems

Engineering:
* Software architectures for self-organising emergent systems
* Modelling approaches to support the design of self-organising
emergent systems
* Middleware Technology:
o for supporting nature-inspired, socially-inspired, and
other types of decentralised coordination mechanisms
o for supporting decentralised information exchange
throughout the system
* Control of emergent properties in self-organising systems
* Design of high-level global behaviour from local interactions
* (Simulation) tools and test-beds for self-organising emergent
systems
* Assessment metrics, performance evaluation, and verification
for self-organising emergent systems.

Applications:
* Experience reports and practical applications of
self-organising emergent systems
* Example application domains (not limited to):
o Peer-to-peer (P2P) applications;
o Overlay-networks;
o Mobile robots;
o Sensor networks, mobile and/or ad hoc networks (MANETs);
o Grids;
o Embedded systems, ubiquitous computing;
o automated transportation and traffic systems;
o Computer networks, telecom networks;
o Multi-agent systems;
o E-business systems and services,
e.g. supply chain management;
o Complex adaptive systems

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SUBMISSIONS
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EEDAS welcomes the submission of original research papers on the
general theme of engineering emergence in autonomic systems which is
described above. We seek theoretical, experimental, methodological as
well as applications papers. Papers may report on completed work,
descriptions of work in progress or discussion papers.

Submissions will be peer reviewed by at least three members of the
program committee. Selection criteria include: relevance, technical
correctness, originality of contribution and quality of exposition.
The aim is to encourage diversity in opinion. Papers that present a
valuable idea but need further development can be accepted as short
communications.

Papers must be submitted in PDF format to eedas (at) cs.kuleuven.be.
The submission should not exceed 10 pages A4 format in the two-column
IEEE CS style (style files can be found at
ftp://pubftp.computer.org/Press/Outgoing/proceedings/).
For submitting papers in PDF format, please ensure that the papers
can be viewed by a standard reader. Thus we discourage the use of
special character sets.

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PUBLICATION
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All accepted papers will be distributed at the workshop in workshop
notes/proceedings and made available on the workshop website before
the workshop.

Subsequently, we aim at a revised selection of papers to be published
as post-proceedings in a Lecture Notes of Computer Science volume
(Springer will be contacted for this).

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ORGANISING COMMITTEE
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* Tom De Wolf
DistriNet Labs, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
* Fabrice Saffre
British Telecom Group CTO, UK
* Richard J. Anthony
University of Greenwich, UK

PRELIMINARY PROGRAM COMMITTEE
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A preliminary program committee can be found on the website. Note that
these people still have to be contacted and as such have no commitment
yet to review papers. However, the list gives an idea on who is
considering as PC member.

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CONTACT
-------
Please submit questions or comments to the EEDAS'07 Organizing
Committee at eedas (at) cs.kuleuven.be

Website: http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~distrinet/events/eedas/2007
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