Coordination, Organization, Institutions, Norms and Ethics in Agent Systems (COINE)

About COINE

Multi-agent systems are often understood as complex entities where a multitude of agents interact, usually with some intended individual or collective purpose. Such a view usually assumes some form of structure or set of norms or conventions that articulate or restrain interactions in order to make them more effective in attaining those goals, more certain for participants, or more predictable. The engineering of effective regulatory mechanisms is a key problem for the design of open complex multi-agent systems.

In recent years, social and organizational aspects of the agency have become a major issue in MAS research. Moreover, recent applications of MAS on Web Services, Grid Computing, and Ubiquitous Computing have enforced the need to use these aspects in order to ensure social order within these environments. Openness, heterogeneity, and scalability of MAS pose new demands on traditional MAS interaction models. The view of coordination and control has to be expanded to consider not only an agent-centric perspective but societal and organization-centric views as well.

Following a series of successful events in the last few years, the topics of coordination, organization, institutions, norms, and ethics have become an important area of research within the agent community. The overall problem of analyzing the social, legal, economic, and technological dimensions of agent organizations and the co-evolution of agent interactions provides theoretically demanding and interdisciplinary research questions at different levels of abstraction.

In order to reach different research communities working on these related topics, some researchers working in the field have decided to create the COINE workshop series. This workshop series will provide a space for the convergence of concerns and developments from MAS researchers who have been involved with these issues from the complementary perspectives of coordination, organizations, institutions, and norms. Additionally, the series will facilitate and coordinate the organization of twin yearly events co-located with large international conferences that are diverse in focus and geographically.

The COIN international workshop series has started in 2006. The idea is to organize the workshop colocated to major AI conferences with interests in agent coordination, organizations, institutions, and norms, like AAMAS, IJCAI, ECAI, etc. Since 2020, the acronym has been updated to COINE since ethics for the governance of MAS became a major issue of interest to the workshop.