Call for papers for special session on: 
Software Agents-Oriented Workflows 
(Concepts - Methods - Tools) 
at 
The 2000 International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IC-AI'2000) 
June 26 - 29, 2000, Monte Carlo Resort, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA 
Due Date: March 6, 2000

The Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC) defines a WF as the automation of 
a business process, in whole or part, during which documents, information 
or tasks are passed from one participant to another for action, according 
to a set of procedural rules. Currently, organisations tend to use WFs in 
order to streamline and coordinate their business processes.
Generally, WFs are designed and saved for later use. Therefore, these WFs 
are pre-defined and static. In this context, one potential drawback of the 
WFs results from their no-adaptability. Moreover, with the recent progress 
of communication middlewares, for instance object request brokers, and 
programming languages for distributed applications, for instance JAVA, 
WFs need to be flexible and scalable. In order to cope with these
requirements, 
a promising approach consists of viewing a WF as a dynamic collection of 
collaborative processes that need to be clustered together. Clustering 
processes and managing their performance could be assigned to intelligent 
components, namely Software Agents (SAs). SAs are attracting much attention 
for their autonomy, cooperative behavior, and lately mobility. Whenever 
needed, and taking into account the characteristics of the environment in 
which they evolve, SAs cluster processes and order them in order to constitute 
the required WFs. Such an approach offers a great flexibility since process 
combination could be directly based on the agent's states, rather than 
being pre-defined in advance.

Topics of interests include but are not limited to: 
* Modeling, designing, and developing software agents-oriented workflows. 
* Software agents for managing cross-organisational workflows. 
* Software agents for adaptive workflows. 
* Applications such as e-commerce, Internet, etc.

Session organizer 
Dr. Zakaria MAAMAR, Defence Scientist 
Interoperability Group, Information System Technology Section 
Defence Research Establishment Valcartier (DREV) 
2459 Pie-XI Blvd North, Val-Bélair QC G3J 1X5, Canada 
Phone: (418) 844-4000 ext. 4427. 
Fax: (418) 844-4538. 
Email: zakaria.maamar@drev.dnd.ca

Submission of papers 
Authors who wish to submit to the session should send either PostScript or 
PDF versions of their paper by email to the session organizer, or else 
provide a URL for an online version of the paper. Hardcopy submission is 
possible if arranged in advance. Submissions should be no more than 
4000 words length (approx. 10 printed pages). The first page of each 
submission should list the full contact details (including full name, 
postal address, email address, phone and fax number) of at least one author. 
All accepted papers will be published in the IC-AI'2000 proceedings

Important dates 
March 6, 2000 (Monday): deadline for paper submission 
April 3, 2000 (Monday): notification of acceptance/rejection 
May 1, 2000 (Monday): camera-Ready papers & Pre reg. due 
June 26 - 29, 2000: IC-AI'2000 Conference

Note 
For information regarding the IC-AI'2000 conference, contact: 
Prof. Hamid R. Arabnia, General Chair, IC-AI'2000 
The University of Georgia, Department of Computer Science 
415 Graduate Studies Research Center 
Athens, Georgia 30602-7404, USA 
Phone: (706) 542-3480 
Fax: (706) 542-2966 
Email: hra@cs.uga.edu