The 7th eCAS Workshop on Engineering Collective Adaptive Systems (eCAS 2022) is co-located with the 3rd IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing and Self-Organizing Systems (ACSOS 2022) that will take place virtually, 19-23 September 2022.

Call for Papers

Modern computing systems tend to be composed of many distributed and heterogeneous entities interacting with one another and with their environment to pursue a variety of goals and functionality. These systems typically operate under continuous perturbations, making manual adjustments and open-loop approaches infeasible, hence requiring self-* features (e.g., self-organisation, self-adaptation, self-configuration…). For a collective system to be resilient, its adaptation must also be collective, in the sense that multiple entities must adapt in a way that addresses critical runtime conditions while preserving the benefits of collaborative interdependencies. Decision-making in such systems is distributed and possibly highly dispersed, and interaction between the entities may lead to the emergence of unexpected phenomena.

To engineer such collective adaptive systems (CAS), new approaches for and understanding of collective adaptation are needed, to allow: i) multiple entities to adapt in a coordinated or complementary way, with ii) negotiations or other mechanisms to decide which collective changes are suitable. Collective adaptation also raises a second important challenge: Which parts of the system (things, services, people) should be engaged in an adaptation, and how? This is nontrivial, as multiple solutions to the same problem may be generated at different levels, and individuals in the collective often have partial information. The challenge is to understand these levels and create mechanisms to decide the right scope for an adaptation for a given problem.

This workshop solicits papers that address new methodologies, theories, principles, and fundamental understanding, that can be used to underpin the design, operation, and analysis of CASs. Case studies, applications showing such approaches in action, and interdisciplinary work are particularly welcome. Research on CAS engineering can benefit from advances in related areas looking “beyond individual devices”, including (but not limited to) multi-agent systems, coordination, concurrency theory, self-* systems, collective intelligence, nature-inspired computing, organisational paradigms, and so on.

Suggested Topics (but not limited to):

  • Novel theories relating to operating principles of CAS
  • Novel design principles for building CAS systems
  • Insights into the short and long-term adaptation of CAS systems
  • Insights into emergent properties of CAS
  • Insights into general properties of large scale, distributed CAS
  • Comparing and analyzing approaches to CAS (e.g., distributed and centralized)
  • Decision-making approaches in CAS
  • Methodologies for studying, analyzing, and building CAS
  • Frameworks for analyzing or developing CAS case studies
  • Languages, platforms, APIs and other tools for CAS
  • Scenarios, case studies, and experience reports of CAS in different contexts (e.g., Smart Mobility, Smart Energy/Smart Grid, Smart Buildings, traffic management, emergency response, etc.)

Important Dates

  • Abstract deadline (soft): July 8th, 2022
  • Submission deadline: July 29th, 2022 (FINAL EXTENDED DEADLINE)
  • Notification: August 7th, 2022
  • Camera-ready deadline: August 12th, 2022 (strict)
  • Workshop date: September 19-23, 2022 (TBC)

All times are intended in Anywhere on Earth (AoE) timezone.

Please submit your contributions from the eCAS submission site on EasyChairs.

Scope

The workshop is expected to attract participants from many disciplines, including (but not limited to) Autonomic Computing, Biology, Game Theory, Evolutionary Computing, Network Science, Self-Organizing Systems, Pervasive Computing, Collective Intelligence, and to be of interest to anyone working with the domain of large-scale self-adaptive systems. In addition, the European Commission has funded seven scientific projects and a Coordination Action in this area, with projects starting at the beginning of 2013. The proposed workshop provides a natural base for the projects to meet and share ideas, yet we stress that the workshop is in no way limited to this audience, and is likely to have broad appeal to a wide range of researchers. Potential audience members might work in application areas relating to large-scale distributed systems, or may come from any of the many disciplines that can provide insights into the operation and design of such systems.

Submission, review, participation, and publication details

  • E-submission site: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ecas2022
  • Originality. Submitted papers must be original, unpublished, and not concurrently submitted for publication elsewhere.
  • Kinds of submissions. The workshop welcomes two kinds of submissions:
    1. Workshop papers: provide original research contributions. These must not exceed 6 pages (including references).
    2. Work-in-Progress (WIP) papers: describe original work-in-progress research which may not have been fully validated. These must not exceed 2 pages (including references).
  • Format. All paper submissions should follow the formatting indications of the main conference, i.e., IEEE 8.5” x 11” Two-Column Format (IEEE Manuscript Templates for Conference Proceedings).
  • Reviews. Papers will be peer reviewed for originality, relevance to themes, significance, soundness, presentation, and overall quality. All papers will be reviewed by a program committee with a minimum of 3 reviews per paper. Reviews will be single-blind.
  • Registration and presentation. At least one of the authors of every accepted paper must register and present the paper at the workshop.
  • Publication. All accepted and presented papers will be submitted to IEEE Xplore and indexing databases like Elsevier, IET, and Scopus.

Workshop Chairs

  • Antonio Bucchiarone (Fondazione Bruno Kessler, IT)
  • Lukas Esterle (Aarhus University, DK)