Aims and scope

The journal provides a leading forum for disseminating significant original research results in the foundations, theory, development, analysis, and applications of autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. Specific topics of interest include, but are not restricted to:

    Agent decision-making architectures and their evaluation, including deliberative, practical reasoning, reactive/behavioural, plan-based, and hybrid architectures.
    Cooperation and teamwork, including organizational structuring and design for multi-agent systems, self-organization, emergent functionality and swarm intelligence.
    Multi-agent planning and planning for multi-agent systems, and the coordination of multi-agent plans and activities.
    Computational auction systems, computational market systems, algorithmic/automated mechanism design, automated negotiation, computational aspects of game theory (cooperative and non-cooperative), and computational social choice theory.
    Knowledge representation and reasoning for, and logical foundations of, autonomous agents and multi-agent systems.
    Agent programming languages - their implementation, semantics, and evaluation.
    Distributed constraint processing and distributed constraint optimization.
    Multi-agent argumentation and dialogue, conflict detection and resolution.
    Multi-agent learning, co-learning, and evolutionary approaches in multi-agent systems.
    Learning agents, including: computational architectures for learning agents; evolution, adaptation; multi-agent learning.
    Agent communication languages, their semantics, pragmatics, and implementation, and agent communication protocols and conversations.
    Conventions, commitments, norms, obligations, and social laws in multi-agent systems, and models of trust and reputation.
    Believable and synthetic agents and characters, and human-agent interaction.
    Environments, testbeds, and program ming languages for experimentation with, and analysis of, agent systems.
    Ontologies for agent systems, agents and the semantic web, agents and semantic web services, Grid-based systems, and service-oriented computing.
    Robotic agents, including: integrated perception, cognition, and action; cognitive robotics; robot planning (including action and motion planning); multi-robot systems.
    Agents as a software engineering paradigm, including agent system development, specification and verification of agent systems, methodologies for autonomous agents and multi-agent systems, analysis and design for multi-agent systems, evaluations of different approaches to developing agent systems, and significant practical experiences with agent system.
    Exploration of relationships between agents and other disciplines such as psychology, linguistics, philosophy, and human-computer interaction; and the relationship between multi-agent systems and other disciplines such as economics/game theory, sociology, and organization theory.
    Significant, novel applications of agent technology.
    Comprehensive reviews and authoritative tutorials of research and practice in agent systems.
    Comprehensive and authoritative reviews of books dealing with agents and multi-agent systems.

Special Issue on Agreement Technologies: a tribute to Carles Sierra's research
Submission Date: 2024-09-30

Agreement Technologies refer to computer systems in which autonomous software agents negotiate with one another, typically on behalf of humans, in order to come to mutually acceptable agreements. An agent may choose whether to fulfill an agreement or not, and it should fulfil it when there is an obligation to do so derived from the standing agreements. Autonomy, interaction, mobility, and openness are key concepts studied within the Agreement Technologies approach. Semantic alignment, negotiation, argumentation, virtual organizations, trust and reputation, and several other technologies are part of the toolbox to define, specify, and verify such systems.

Agreement Technologies amalgamates a wide range of topics that have been at the core of Multiagent Systems research for decades. A Springer book was published on Agreement Technologies in 2013, and a conference series was created in 2012 dedicated to the topic. The AT conference editions were held in Dubrovnik in 2012, Beijing in 2013, Athens in 2015, Valencia in 2016, Paris in 2017, Bergen in 2018, and Thessaloniki in 2020.

The purpose of this special issue is to revise the current advancements in Agreement Technologies and, at the same time, pay homage to one of the main contributors to research on Agreement Technologies: Professor Carles Sierra, who was amongst the first to shape the field in terms of five key areas (semantics, norms, organisations, argumentation and negotiation, and trust and reputation). He received the 2019 ACM/SIGAI Autonomous Agents Research Award for his seminal contributions to agreement technologies and, more specifically, for his research on negotiation and argumentation, computational trust and reputation, and artificial social systems. With the occasion of Carles Sierra’s 60th birthday, this special issue will serve to revise the current advancements in the field.

The special issue targets high-quality original papers covering all aspects of agreement technologies, including, but not limited to, the list of topics below. Manuscripts that extend a previous conference or workshop publication are welcome, provided that there is a significant amount of new material in the submission (i.e., the manuscript should contain at least 50% new material).

Guest editors
Michael Luck, University of Sussex
Pablo Noriega, IIIA-CSIC
Nardine Osman, IIIA-CSIC
Juan A. Rodríguez-Aguilar, IIIA-CSIC
Michael Wooldridge, University of Oxford

Topics

The following is a non-exhaustive list of topics that we would like to cover in the special issue:

    Agreement technologies, architectures, environments, and methodologies
    Negotiation
    Argumentation
    Trust and reputation
    Normative systems
    Artificial social systems
    Electronic institutions
    Semantic alignment
    Value alignment: reasoning and learning
    Collective value alignment
    Large language models for agreements
    Coalition and team formation
    Social Intelligence
    Applications of agreement technologies
    Social welfare, fairness, and ethics in agreements
    Decision and game theoretic foundations for agreements
    Collective decision-making
    Judgement aggregation

Timeline
Submission deadline: Extended to September 30, 2024

Manuscript submissions will be considered for publication in the AT special issue continuously until the submission deadline. Submissions accepted for publication before the completion of the special issue will be available on the journal website shortly after acceptance.

Submission procedure

To submit, you should visit the online system at https://editorial.springernature.com and create a new account if you do not already have one. When creating your submission on the system, select the submission type "Manuscript," and then in the "Additional Information" section, answer "Yes" when asked if your manuscript belongs to a special issue, then select "S.I.: Agreement Technologies: a tribute to Carles Sierra’s research." If you do not mark your manuscript correctly as belonging to the special issue, it may not reach the correct editors.

Authors are encouraged to submit high-quality, original work that has neither appeared in nor is under consideration by other journals.  

All papers will be reviewed following standard reviewing procedures for the Journal. 

Papers must be prepared in accordance with the Journal guidelines: www.springer.com/10458