CALL FOR PAPERS

DARPA-JFACC SYMPOSIUM ON
ADVANCES IN ENTERPRISE CONTROL

San Diego, CA
Tentative Dates: November 15-16, 1999

http:// www.darpa.mil/iso/jfacc/

Aims and Scope:

The purpose of the Symposium is to bring together researchers and
practitioners from industry, government and academia to present and
discuss the latest developments in all aspects of enterprise control.
The Symposium is sponsored by the Joint Force Air Component Commander
(JFACC) Program in the Information Systems Office (ISO) of the Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The Symposium seeks papers
that (a) describe the results of original research on the topics of
interest, (b) provide broad reviews of the state-of-the-art, and (c)
propose and advocate new research directions. Also invited are papers
that describe significant practical experiences with current enterprise
control systems: complex dynamic phenomena, non-obvious successes and
failures, requirements and unmet needs. Note that the security
classification of this Symposium is unclassified.

The modern enterprise is a large-scale dynamic system with broadly
distributed and potentially conflicting goals, resources and
constraints, with multiple semi-autonomous participants of both human
and artificial nature (e.g., large military operations,
financial/trading institutions, logistics systems, manufacturing plants,
power grids). The increasing capabilities of technology to collect,
automatically generate, and disseminate information offer the
possibility for large-scale enterprises to be more responsive to change.
Enterprise plans and orders quickly become obsolete as new information
about the current situation becomes available. The challenge is to use
real-time information to re-direct enterprise operations effectively.
Such systems and challenges define the scope of the Symposium.

Topics of Interest:

Submissions are invited in all areas pertaining to the design, analysis
and implementation of enterprise control systems. Topics include but are
not limited to:
 - modeling and representations of large-scale enterprise control
systems
 - reasoning at multiple levels of abstraction
 - computer-aided synthesis and design
 - simulation and verification
 - controllability and stability
 - integrated planning/scheduling/control
 - adaptive control in large-scale enterprises
 - game-theoretic control and adversarial control
 - role and impact of humans on the control loop
 - distributed and multi-agent control architectures
 - observation and state estimation
 - failures and pathological behavior in enterprise control
 - requirements of and for enterprise control systems
 - applications and case studies

Submissions:

Researchers are invited to submit an extended abstract as a postscript,
MS Word, or pdf file via e-mail to jfacc_program@darpa.mil. The abstract
should not exceed 10 double-spaced pages or 4 pages in two-column
format. The first page should include the title of the paper, each
author’s name and affiliation, complete contact information for the
corresponding author (postal and e-mail addresses, telephone and fax
numbers), and a one-paragraph summary of the contribution. Full versions
of the accepted submissions will be published in the proceedings
following the Symposium. Full versions of the papers must conform to the
standards of IEEE Computer Society Press guidelines for conference
proceedings (see http://computer.org/cspress/instruct.htm). It is an
intent of this Symposium to encourage interactions of practitioners and
theoreticians, and to make the innovative research more accessible to
the enterprise leaders and decision-makers. To this end, all theoretical
papers should contain a section that illustrates the key idea and
significance of the paper in qualitative terms and examples, and does
not require an extensive control-theoretic background.

Important Dates:

  Submission deadline:  September 13, 1999
  Notification of acceptance: September 27, 1999
  Final versions due:  November 10, 1999


Program Committee:
Program Committee will be announced on the Symposium webpage after
August 1, 1999.

Registration and Hotel Information:
Confirmed dates of the Symposium and the registration and hotel
information will be posted on the Symposium webpage after August 1,
1999. There is no fee for this Symposium, however, transportation,
lodging, and meal expenses are the responsibility of the attendees.



--
Alexander Kott, PhD,  Logica Carnegie Group
Director, Research and Technology Development
mailto:kotta@logica.com
(412) 642-6900