Second International Workshop on Agents and Peer-to-Peer Computing

In P2P computing peers and services forego central coordination and dynamically organise themselves to support knowledge sharing and collaboration, in both cooperative and non-cooperative environments. The success of P2P systems strongly depends on a number of factors. Firstly, the ability to ensure equitable distribution of content and services. Economic and business models which rely on incentive mechanisms to supply contributions to the system are being developed, along with methods for controlling the "free riding" issue. Second, the ability to enforce provision of trusted services. Reputation based P2P trust management models are becoming a focus of the research community as a viable solution. The trust models must balance both constraints imposed by the environment (e.g. scalability) and the unique properties of trust as a social and psychological phenomenon. Recently, we are also witnessing a move of the P2P paradigm to embrace mobile computing in an attempt to achieve even higher ubiquitousness. The possibility of services related to physical location and the relation with agents in physical proximity could introduce new opportunities and also new technical challenges. Although researchers working on distributed computing, MultiAgent Systems, databases and networks have been using similar concepts for a long time, it is only fairly recently that papers motivated by the current P2P paradigm have started appearing in high quality conferences and workshops. Research in agent systems in particular appears to be most relevant because, since their inception, MultiAgent Systems have always been thought of as collections of peers. This workshop brings together researchers working on agent systems and P2P computing with the intention of strengthening this connection. http://p2p.ingce.unibo.it/