Third International Workshop on Agents and Peer-to-Peer Computing(AP2PC 2004)

Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing is attracting enormous media attention, spurred by the popularity of file sharing systems such as Napster, Gnutella, and Morpheus. The peers are autonomous, or as some call them, first-class citizens. P2P networks are emerging as a new distributed computing paradigm for their potential to harness the computing power of the hosts composing the network and make their under-utilized resources available to others. This possibility has generated a lot of interest in many industrial organizations which have already launched important projects.In P2P systems, peer and web services in the role of resources become shared and combined to enable new capabilities greater than the sum of the parts. This means that services can be developed and treated as pools of methods that can be composed dynamically. The decentralized nature of P2P computing makes it also ideal for economic environments that foster knowledge sharing and collaboration as well as cooperative and non-cooperative behaviors in sharing resources. Business models are being developed, which rely on incentive mechanisms to supply contributions to the system and methods for controlling free riding. Clearly, the growth and the management of P2P networks must be regulated to ensure adequate compensation of content and/or service providers. At the same time, there is also a need to ensure equitable distribution of content and services.Although researchers working on distributed computing, MultiAgent Systems, databases and networks have been using similar concepts for a long time, it is only 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 networks of peers.The MultiAgent paradigm can thus be superimposed on the P2P architecture, where agents embody the description of the task environments, the decision-support capabilities, the collective behavior, and the interaction protocols of each peer. The emphasis in this context on decentralization, user autonomy, ease and speed of growth that gives P2P its advantages, also leads to significant potential problems. Most prominent among these problems are coordination: the ability of an agent to make decisions on its own actions in the context of activities of other agents, and scalability: the value of the P2P systems lies in how well they scale along several dimensions, including complexity, heterogeneity of peers, robustness, traffic redistribution, and so on. It is important to scale up coordination strategies along multiple dimensions to enhance their tractability and viability, and thereby to widen the application domains. These two problems are common to many large-scale applications. Without coordination, agents may be wasting their efforts, squander resources and fail to achieve their objectives in situations requiring collective effort.This workshop will bring together researchers working on agent systems and P2P computing with the intention of strengthening this connection. Researchers from other related areas such as distributed systems, networks and database systems will also be welcome (and, in our opinion, have a lot to contribute).