- EUMAS 2009: Seventh European Workshop on Multi-Agent Systems (EUMAS 2009) http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=eumas09 deadline: 14th sept, venue 17-18th Dec 09

- ESAW-09 10th Annual International Workshop: Engineering Societies in the Agents' World http://www.cs.uu.nl/esaw2009/ 18-20 Nov 09

- SASO-09 Workshop on Metareasoning in Self Adaptive Systems http://www.sis.uncc.edu/~anraja/SASOMeta09 deadline July 10th, venue: Sept 15th

- AAMAS 2009: Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems http://www.conferences.hu/AAMAS2009/

- ISA 2008: IADIS International Conference Intelligent Systems and Agents 2008 http://www.isa-conf.org

- COIN@AAMAS08: Coordination, Organization, Institutions and Norms in agent systems (COIN) Workshop at AAMAS 2008 http://www.emse.fr/coin08/COIN%40AAMAS_2008.html

- OAMAS'08: Organised Adaptation in Multiagent Systems. Workshop at AAMAS 2008. http://oamas08.iit.demokritos.gr/

- AAMAS'08: Seventh International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems http://gaips.inesc-id.pt/aamas2008/

- Eighth Annual International Workshop "Engineering Societies in the Agents World" (ESAW 2006) http://esaw07.iit.demokritos.gr/

- Second International Workshop on Agent Technology and Autonomic Computing (ATAC'2007) http://cloud.cms.livjm.ac.uk/atac2007/

- MA4CS 2007: Multi-Agents for modelling Complex Systems http://www710.univ-lyon1.fr/~hassas/MA4CS07/

- ASAmI'07: Artificial Societies for Ambient Intelligence http://asami07.cs.rhul.ac.uk/

- AAMAS 2007: International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems http://www.aamas2007.org/

- Coordination, Organization, Institutions and Norms in agent systems (COIN) Durham UK 3rd-4th September 2007 http://www.cs.bath.ac.uk/COIN2007/

- Coordination, Organization, Institutions and Norms in agent systems (COIN) Workshop at AAMAS 2007 http://www.ia.urjc.es/COIN2007/

- SASO 2007: First IEEE International Conference on Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems http://projects.csail.mit.edu/saso2007/

- IEEE IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing http://www.autonomic-conference.org/

- International Conference on Self-Organization and Autonomic Systems in Computing and Communications (SOAS'2006) http://www.soas2006.org/Soas2006/cfp.htm

- First International Workshop on Agent Technology and Autonomic Computing (ATAC'2006) http://www.netobjectdays.org/de/conf/atac.html

- Cora Beatriz Excelente-toledo and Jennings In "The Dynamic Selection of Coordination Mechanisms" they define a decision making framework that enables agents to dynamically select the coordination mechanism that is most appropriate to their circumstances. Their framework is concerned with deciding whether coordination should be attempted in a given context and, if so, which of the available mechanisms is the most appropriate to employ in the prevailing situation. paper

- Fabiola Lopez y Lopez, Michael Luck, and Mark d'Inverno (norm reasoning). In "Constraining autonomy through norms" they address some of the aspects that must be considered in order to incorporate norms in agents. They propose a set of strategies to be used by agents in norm-based systems and analyze the effeffects of autonomous norms compliance in both agents and societies through some simulation experiments. paper

- David Fitoussi and Moshe Tennenholtz (offline design): "Choosing Social Laws for Multi-Agent Systems: Minimality and Simplicity" in AI vol 119 (2000) paper. Notions of minimal and simple social laws as basic criteria for selecting among alternative (useful) social laws. They are applied to two basic settings: Automated-Guided-Vehicles (AGV) with traffic laws and consensus in Distributed computing. This work assumes an Enviroment consisting of (two) agents and a set of strategies available to (each of) them. From this set, agents devise the appropriate ones in order to reach their assigned goals without violating social laws, which must be respected.

- David J. Montana and Steven Czerwinski: "Evolving Control Laws for a Network of Traffic Signals" in Proceddings of the First Annual Genetic Programming Conference,1996 paper In this preliminary work, they use Strongly Typed Genetic Programming (STGP) to controll the timings of traffic signals within a network of orthogonal intersections. Their evaluation function computes the overall delay, that is, time lost due to traffic signals.

- Marco Camurri, Marco Mamei, and Franco Zambonelli: "Urban Traffic Control with Co-Fields" in E4MAS Workshop at AAMAS 2006 paper This paper proposes two field-based mechanisms to control cars and traffic-lights. Its proposed driving policy guides cars towards their (forward) destinations avoiding the most crowded areas. On the other hand, traffic light control is based on a linear combination between a distance field and the locally perceived traffic field (each local value is computed as the sum of the number of cars waiting in its queue and the number of cars waiting in the queues of those traffic lights that cand send cars towards it). Additionally, authors combine this driving policy and traffic light control in order to manage to avoid deadlocks and congestion.

- Bryan Horling, Brett Benyo, and Victor Lesser "Using Self-Diagnosis to Adapt Organizational Structures" in Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Autonomous Agents (June 2001) pp.529-536 paper. They propose an approach where adaptation of organizational structures is performed by diagnosis at runtime. A general diagnosis engine is defined to drive the adaptation process, using the TÆMS modeling language as the primary representation of organizational information. The results are presented in the context of Producer-Consumer-Transporter domain.

- Less Gasser and Toru Ishida: "A Dynamic Organizational Achitecture for Adaptive Problem Solving" in Proceedings AAAI'91 (Anaheim, CA). pp. 185-190 paper. Tom Ishida, Les Gasser, and Makoto Yokoo : "Organization Self-Design of Distributed Production Systems" in IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON KNOWLEDGE AND DATA ENGINEERING, Vol. 4, No. 2, April 1992, 123-134. paper. Domain: distributed production systems (a production system is a set of rules or productions together with an assertion database). This paper presents an approach that relies on the reorganization of a collection of problem-solvers to track changes in response requirements, problem solving requests, and resource requirements. The approach exploits an adaptive tradeoff of resources and organization form to satisfy for time and performance constraints. Agents are created and destroyed, and domain knowledge is continually reallocated. To extend the possible architectures for Organization Self-Design (OSD), composition and decomposition have been introduced as new reorganization primitives. Decomposition divides one agent into two to increase parallelism, and composition combines two agents into one to save community-wide computing resources. Organization Self-Design (OSD) is obtained through repeated application. Organizational knowledge has been formalized to represent interactions among agents and their organization. It dynamically changes interagent relationships, the knowledge agents have about one another, the size of the agent population, and the resources allocated to each agent.

Currently, We are reading work carried out by:

- Christian Hahn, Bettina Fley, and Michael Florian"Self-regulation through social institutions: A framework for the design of open agent-based electronic marketplaces" in Comput Math Organiz Theor (2006) 12:181-204. paper

- Moshe Tennenholtz (offline design): "On Stable Social Laws and Qualitative Equilibrium for Risk-Averse Agents" in AI vol 102 (1998) paper

- Peter Stone (coaching + traffic): "Multiagent Traffic Management: An Improved Intersection Control Mechanism" in AAMAS-05 paper

- Jaime Simao Sichman (reorganization): "Using the MOISE+ for a Cooperative Framework of MAS Reorganisation" paper "Specifying E-Alliane contract dynamics through the MOISE+ reorganization process" paper

- Tom de Wolf: "Engineering Self-Organising Emergent Systems with Simulation-based Scientific Analysis" paper "Decentralised Autonomic Computing: Analysing Self-Organising Emergent Behaviour using Advanced Numerical Methods" paper

- Arnaud Doniec et al. "Dealing with Multi-Agent Coordination by Anticipation: Application to the Traffic Simulation at Junctions" paper

- Cosino Anglano and Stefania Montani: "Achieving Self-Healing in Autonomic Software Systems: a Case-Based Reasoning Approach" Technical report (2005) paper

- Gabriel Balan and Sean Luke: "History-based Traffic Control" in Proceddings of AAMAS 2006 paper

- Mark Hoogendoorn: Adaptation of Organizational Models for Multi-Agent Systems based on Max Flow Networks, To appear in Proceedings of the Twentieth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI Press, 2007 paper. This approach adapts organizations to environmental changes dynamically. It translates organizational models into max flow networks. Also Mark Hoogendoorn, Catholijn M. Jonker, and Jan Treur : "REDESIGN OF ORGANIZATIONS AS A BASIS FOR ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE" in paper. Other papers can be found at http://www.few.vu.nl/~mhoogen/publ.html

- Barry Smith and John Searle : "The Construction of Social Reality: An Exchange" to appear in American Journal of Economics and Sociology paper

- Sandip Sen and Stéphane Airiau: "Emergence of Norms Through Social Learning" in Proceedings of the IJCAI-07. pp. 1507-1512 paper.

When formalizing, we are also considering:

- Course materials kindly provided by Julian Padget http://alis-learn.cs.bath.ac.uk/

- Alexander Artikis, Jeremy Pitt and Marek Sergot, "Animated Specifications of Computational Societies" in AAMAS'02 pp 1053-1061 paper