[TYPES] First CLIMA Contest: participate by May 20, 2005

[clima VI <clima-vi at deis.unibo.it>]

[Apologies for cross-postings. Please send to interested colleagues and students]

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                        Call for Contributions to

                         THE FIRST CLIMA CONTEST

     a special event of CLIMA VI, the Sixth International Workshop on
               Computational Logics in Multi-Agent Systems

               City University London, UK, June 27-29, 2005
                 http://clima.deis.unibo.it/contest.html

                          DEADLINE: May 20, 2005

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Multi-agent  systems  are  beginning  to play an important role in today’s
software  development.  See  for example the forthcoming new International
Journal of Agent-Oriented Software Engineering

This  competition  is  an  attempt  to  stimulate  research in the area of
multi-agent systems by

    * identifying key problems and
    * collecting suitable benchmarks

that  can  serve  as  milestones for testing new approaches and techniques
from  computational  logics.  While  there  exist  several competitions in
various  parts  of  artificial  intelligence  (theorem  proving, planning,
robo-cup  etc)  and,  lately,  also  in specialised areas in agent systems
(trading  agents),  the  emphasis  of  this  contest  is  on  the  use  of
'computational logic' in (multi-) agent systems.

We  expect  to  promote  the  development  of multi-agent systems by first
identifying  difficult  problems  and  then finding solutions by comparing
different approaches from computational logic for solving them. While this
idea  seems  very  appealing,  it  is  not  an easy task to come up with a
particular  scenario that serves as a basis for a contest. Such a scenario
should  be  generic enough to be applicable for a wide range of techniques
of  computational  logic,  but  it  should  also be precise enough so that
different approaches can be tested and compared against each other.


- Scenario description

This  competition is organised as part of CLIMA and consists of developing
multi-agent  systems to solve a cooperative task in a dynamically changing
environment.  The  environment  of  the  multi-agent system is a grid-like
world  where agents can move from one slot to a neighbouring slot if there
is  no agent already in that slot. In this environment, food can appear in
all but one of these slots. The special slot, in which no food can appear,
is  considered  as  a  depot  where the agents can bring and collect their
food.  An  agent  can observe if there is food in the slot it is currently
visiting.  Initially,  food can be placed in some randomly selected slots.
During  the  execution, additional food can appear dynamically in randomly
selected  slots  except the depot slot. The agents may have/play different
roles  (such as explorer or collector), communicate and cooperate in order
to find and collect food in an efficient and effective way.

We  encourage  submissions that specify and design a multi-agent system in
terms  of  high-level  concepts  such  as  goals,  beliefs,  plans, roles,
communication,   coordination,  negotiation,  and  dialogue  in  order  to
generate  an  efficient  and  effective  solution  for the above mentioned
application.  Moreover,  the  multi-agent system implementations should be
based  on  computational  logic techniques (e.g. logic programming, formal
calculi,  etc)  and  they  should  reflect  their  design  in a direct and
intuitive way.

The  challenge  of  this  competition  is  thus to use computational logic
techniques  to  provide  implemented models for the abstract concepts that
are  used  in  the  specification and design of multi-agent systems. These
implemented  models  should be integrated to implement the above-mentioned
application intuitively, directly, and effectively.


- Submission format

A submission consists of two parts.

The  first part is a description of analysis, design and implementation of
a  multi-agent  system  for  the  above  application. Existing multi-agent
system  methodologies such as Gaia, Prometheus and Tropos can be used (not
demanded)  to  describe  the  analysis  and  design of the system. For the
description  of  the implementation, it should be explained how the design
is  implemented.  This  can  be  done  by  explaining,  for example, which
computational  logic  techniques  are used to implement certain aspects of
the  multi-agent  system  (including issues related to individual agents).
The  maximum  length  of this description is 5 pages according to the LNCS
format.

The  second  part is an (executable) implementation of the application. We
do  not  demand  any particular way (data format, algorithm, mechanism) to
implement  the system as long as it is implemented as a multi-agent system
and  as  long  as  the environment is a 20x20 grid. Moreover, it should be
possible  to  configure the initial state of the environment to place food
in  arbitrary slots. During the execution food should appear automatically
every  20 seconds in a randomly selected slot. The multi-agent system will
be  run  with 4 agents that are positioned initially at the corners of the
grid.  The  implementation  should  be  executable  on  a windows or linux
machine.


- How To Submit

Please  follow  this link to register and submit the 5 page description of
your  solution.  You  can then submit the implementation by e-mail (to the
CLIMA  Contest  Chairs)  or  by  specifying  in your paper a URL where the
implementation  can be downloaded from. In the registration, please select
'Competition' in the paper type (tracks) drop-down menu.


- Winning Criteria

The criteria that will be used to evaluate submission and to select the
first three winners are as follows:

 1. Original, innovative, and effective application of computational logic
    techniques  in  solving specific multi-agent issues identified in this
    application.
 2. The  performance  of the executable implementation. The performance of
    the  executable implementation will be measured based on the amount of
    food  that  is collected by the multi-agent system in a certain period
    of  time.  All programs will be run on the same machine (Windows/Linux
    double boot machine).
3. The  quality  of the description of analysis, design and implementation
   of   the   multi-agent   system,   the   elegance  of  its  design  and
   implementation,  and  the  ease  of  installation  and execution of the
   program.


- Organisation

The  First  CLIMA Contest is organised by Jürgen Dix, Technical University
of Clausthal, and Mehdi Dastani, Utrecht University


- Evaluation Committee

    * Marco Alberti, University of Ferrara, Italy
    * Federico Chesani, University of Bologna, Italy
    * Mehdi Dastani, Utrecht University, The Netherlands (chair)
    * Jürgen Dix, Technical University of Clausthal, Germany (chair)
    * Marco Gavanelli, University of Ferrara, Italy
    * Kostas Stathis, City University London, UK
    * Francesca Toni, Imperial College London, UK
    * Paolo Torroni, University of Bologna, Italy


- Important Dates (no extensions)

    * Submission: May 20, 2005
    * Notification: May 27, 2005
    * Camera-Ready: June 6, 2005
    * Winner announcement: at CLIMA, June 27-29, 2005


- Prize

There will be a prize for the winner. A selection of teams will be invited
to extend their description for publication in the post-proceedings.