ANNOUNCEMENT - unfortunately, the 2009 edition of PROTOCOL was cancelled. In 2010, we will organise the next edition of the workshop, of which details can be found on this page as soon as details are arranged.

Established and upcoming research areas such as multi-agent systems, nature-inspired/evolutionary computation, pervasive/autonomic computing and collective intelligence all share one single important property: the involvement of a collective of individuals (agents, solutions, humans, insects, CPUs) that has to accomplish a goal or objective. The types of collective systems commonly used in the mentioned areas can be considered in the range from (on the one extreme) closed and centralised computer clusters at a single location, to (on the other extreme) open and distributed human-computer networks located world-wide. The issue of programming these systems is central to this workshop, as well as closely related facets like requirement specification, design (patterns), formal models, simulation and implementation.

The aim of this workshop is to bring together researchers with a theoretical perspective (formal, logics, representation) and a practical perspective (simulation, fieldwork, algorithms) on the development of self-organising and self-adaptive systems. The result of the event is a forum to establish unified models, methods and techniques for the purpose of programming collectives in general.