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