Agents and computational autonomy

This volume contains the postproceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Computational Autonomy – Potential, Risks, Solutions (AUTONOMY 2003), held at the 2nd International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-agentSystems(AAMAS2003), July14,2003, Melbourne, Australia. Apart from revised versions of the accepted workshop papers, we have included invited contributions from leading experts in the ? eld. With this, the present volume represents the ? rst comprehensive survey of the state-of-the-art of research on autonomy, capturing di? erent theories of autonomy, perspectives on autonomy in di? erent kinds of agent-based systems, and practical approaches to dealing with agent autonomy. Agent orientation refers to a software development perspective that has evolved in the past 25 years in the ? elds of computational agents and multiagent systems. The basic notion underlying this perspective is that of a computational agent, that is, an entity whose behavior deserves to be called ? exible, social, and autonomous. As an autonomous entity, an agent possesses action choice and is at least to some extent capable of deciding and acting under self-control. Through its emphasis on autonomy, agent orientation signi? cantly di? ers from traditional engineering perspectives such as structure orientation or object o- entation. These perspectives are targeted on the development of systems whose behavior is fully determined and controlled by external units (e. g., by a p- grammer at design time and/or a user at run time), and thus inherently fail to capture the notion of autonomy.