Subject: CFP: Agents in Information and Process Management Workshop at KI-98
From: Joerg Mueller <jpm@zuno.com>
To: elsnet-list@cogsci.ed.ac.uk
Cc: Christoph Klauck <klauck@Informatik.Uni-Bremen.DE>
Date: Thu, 12 Mar 1998 08:48:29 +0000

CALL FOR PAPERS *** CALL FOR PAPERS *** CALL FOR PAPERS ***

International Workshop on Intelligent Agents in Information
and Process Management

	KI-98, Bremen, Germany, September 15-17, 1998
http://www.informatik.uni-bremen.de/~klauck/KI98WS/home.html

Workshop description

The subject of this workshop is the use of
intelligent agents, i.e., autonomous, cooperating
software systems, for planning, controlling, and
optimizing production and business processes.

The workshop is intended to foster an interdisciplinary 
perspective. The investigation of common ground and 
differences between the planning and control of material flow
processes (e.g., production planning and control) on
the one hand and processes dominated by flow of information 
(e.g., workflow systems) on the other hand is of particular 
interest for the workshop.

AGENTS IN PRODUCTION PLANNING AND CONTROL

An important area within PPC deals with optimizing
planning and execution of shopfloor scheduling, aiming in 
particular at the integration of sustained environmental 
protection.

As regards short-term shop floor production planning
and control, achieving flexible, high-performance control 
mechanisms is an important requirement for the following 
reasons:
  * to enable appropriate reaction to short-term changes 
    in demand and in the availability of resources and 
    capacities;                     
  * to incorporate environmental data into decision-making 
    policies for production planning, thus taking aspects 
    of environmental protection into account in addition 
    to economic production objectives.

Traditional PPC approaches encounter problems in
these areas: They do not sufficiently  support
flexible short-term reactions to unexpected
disruptions in production. Also, the  integration of
environmental data additionally increases the
planning complexity to a degree traditional PPC
systems cannot cope with.

Many researchers in the fields hope that the recent
dawn of intelligent software agents will  provide
them with solutions to these problems. This workshop
encourages research investigating the extent to which 
this may be true: How well do intelligent agents as
decentralized problem solvers perform in solving
real-time PPC problems, involving traditional optimization 
techniques? What agent theories, architectures, and tools 
prove most useful in achieving this added value?

AGENTS IN INFORMATION AND PROCESS MANAGEMENT

As opposed to PPS applications, processes in these
areas are foremost information
processes: the focus is on planning and controlling
information flows and workflows.
However, there are some interesting similarities
between the two: enterprise and social
structures change rapidly in the light of
globalization, and new flexible enterprise forms
(virtual enterprises) call for robust and flexible
information systems. In addition to these
social factors, there is a technological
revolution taking place: the rapid development of
global information networks and the availability
of web-based technolgies enable -- for the  first
time in the history of IT -- the development of
global information systems on a uniform basis.
Intelligent agents are considered to be a key
technology for solving the numerous problems and
requirements that result from these developments.



Workshop topics

Topics of interest for the workshop include but are
not restricted to

THEORIES
- problem solving techniques
- planning and scheduling agents
- multi-agent approaches to information and process management
- specification of agents and multiagent systems
- formal models of agents
- validation and verification of system properties
- decentralized vs centralized approaches: potential, problems,
trade-offs

LANGUAGES AND DEVELOPMENT TOOLS
- agent languages
- tools for agent-based programming and software development
- design methodologies
- agents vs objects

APPLICATIONS
- agents in information management applications
- agents in office automation applications
- agents in production planning and control applications
- agents in business process management applications

INFORMATION MANAGEMENT vs PROCESS MANAGEMENT
- what do both areas have in common?
- where are the main differences?
- what is the benefit of agents in integrating information and 
  process management
- planning and execution


Submission details

We invite submissions of technical papers dealing
with any of the topics listed above. Papers can be
long presentations (up to 12 pages, times, 12pt) or
short papers (up to 5 pages, same format). People who
are interested in attending the workshop without
submitting a paper are welcome. We would like to ask them 
to send a brief statement of interest.

We ask for electronic submission of all papers in

* Microsoft Word or
* Postscript format

to Joerg Mueller (jpm@zuno.com) NO LATER THAN May 15, 1998.

Timetable
	Submissions due 		May 15, 1998
	Notification of accepted papers	June 30, 1998
	Final versions due 		July 31, 1998

Programme Committee (* = member of organizing committee)
	
	Stefan Bussmann		D
	Hans Corsten		D
	Frank Dignum		NL
	Klaus Fischer		D
	Anja Holsten		D*
	Gregor Joeris		D*
	Stefan Kirn		D
	Christoph Klauck	D*
	Matthias Klusch		US*
	Rainer Lamping		D*
	Paul Levi		D
	H Juergen Mueller	D*
	Joerg P. Mueller	UK*
	Katia Sycara		US
	Stephan Zelewski	D	

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