Most researchers in the multi-agent community agree that the environment is an essential part of any multi-agent system (MAS). However, nowadays' models, methodologies and tools for MAS typically reduce the environment to a message transport system or broker infrastructure, thus neglecting a rich potential of (environments in) MAS. Promising work on environments has been done in the domain of situated MAS, however we are just at the very beginning of understanding the complex principles behind the environment-related concepts and the interplay between the agents and the environment. After a successful first edition of E4MAS last year in New York, the focus of this year's workshop is on (1) the investigation of the role and the responsibilities of environments in muti-agent systems, (2) opportunities that environments offer in multi-agent systems, and (3) engineering of the environment to realize its potential.

URL: http://www.cs.kuleuven.ac.be/~distrinet/events/e4mas/

Organizers: Danny Weyns, H. Van Dyke Parunak, Fabien Michel