Main TrackACSOS 2026

The IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing and Self-Organizing Systems (ACSOS) is the premier venue for advancing research in autonomic computing, self-adaptation, and self-organization. The conference serves as a synergistic forum for interdisciplinary collaboration, bridging academic and industrial perspectives across domains such as artificial intelligence, computational biology, and computer systems. ACSOS features a diverse program, including research papers, experience reports, posters, demonstrations, and a doctoral symposium, fostering innovation and knowledge exchange.

ACSOS 2026 invites submissions on theoretical aspects, modeling, design, implementation, evaluation, verification, and practical applications of autonomic, self-adaptive, self-organizing, and multi-agent systems, algorithms, and techniques. This includes, but is not limited to, the following areas:

• Models and Algorithms: bio-inspired and socially inspired paradigms and heuristics; collective behavior of decentralized agents and systems; swarm intelligence; evolution and learning; organic computing; requirement and goal expression techniques; formal expressions of uncertainty; agent-based modeling to help understand existing systems; digital twins.
• Theoretical aspects: theoretical frameworks; formal languages; game theory; queuing and control theory; symbolic knowledge representation.
• Systems properties: performance; robustness; resilience, dependability, and reliability; trustworthiness; resource and energy efficiency; stability; diversity; self-protection and cybersecurity; self-reference and reflection; emergent behavior; explainability; interpretability; computational awareness and self-awareness.
• Engineering aspects: design patterns; programming languages; architectures; operating systems and middleware; testing, validation, and assurance methodologies; runtime models; large-scale, decentralized, and multi-agent systems; data science and analytics; machine learning and artificial intelligence; LLMs and agentic AI systems; communication and intelligent routing; distributed learning, including federated learning; multi-agent infrastructures.
• Cross-disciplinary methods: approaches inspired by complex systems, chemistry, psychology, sociology, biology, and ethology.
• Socio-technical factors: human and social factors; visualization; crowdsourcing and collective awareness; guardrails and legal or regulatory compliance in self-* techniques; trust, ethics, privacy, sustainability, and social and environmental implications.
• Applications: papers across all application domains are welcome, including (but not limited to) enterprise systems, cyber-physical systems, smart agriculture, robot swarms, federated LLMs, manufacturing, autonomous vehicles, smart environments, disaster response, smart traffic management, datacenter infrastructure, resource management and scheduling, smart grids, scientific computing, virtual reality, and human–machine interaction.

We intend to continue the tradition of giving the best papers of the conference an opportunity to publish an extended version in a special issue related to ACSOS. Details will follow.

ACSOS 2026 plans to award the Karsten Schwan Best Paper Award and the Best Student Paper Award (where the primary author is a student) to papers of outstanding quality.

Types of submissions:

• Research Papers (up to 10 pages) should present and rigorously evaluate novel ideas and techniques in the areas outlined in this call.
• Experience Reports (up to 10 pages) should describe experiences with industrial-strength or commercially deployed systems, widely used open-source platforms, innovative implementations, performance studies, or applications of recent research advances. These submissions will be evaluated primarily on the depth and quality of experiments and results.
• Vision Papers (up to 6 pages) introduce provocative or controversial ideas, propose new research agendas, discuss long-term challenges, and foster debate. Rigorous empirical evaluation is not required, though initial results are encouraged.

Submissions are welcome from academia, industry, or academic–industrial collaborations. The delineation of submission types is not intended to steer industry participants exclusively toward experience reports.

We also encourage submissions solely on new benchmarks and datasets under the Experience Reports category. Such benchmarks and datasets should be open-source.

Research papers and experience reports will be included in the main conference proceedings. Vision and short papers will be published in the ACSOS Companion proceedings. Both volumes will be submitted to the IEEE Computer Society Press and published in the IEEE Digital Library.

All submissions must be anonymized for double-blind peer review and formatted according to the IEEE Computer Society Press proceedings style guide.

Papers must be submitted electronically in PDF format via EasyChair through the ACSOS 2026 conference management system.

Page limits include all technical content (figures, tables, etc.) but exclude bibliographic references and appendices. Up to two additional pages may be used for references and appendices.

Appendices should be clearly marked. Reviewers are not required to read appendices but may do so at their discretion.

Papers that violate formatting or submission policies may be desk-rejected without review.

ACSOS authors should follow the standard IEEE submission policy, including the plagiarism, self-plagiarism, and Gen AI policy outlined at: https://conferences.ieeeauthorcenter.ieee.org/author-ethics/guidelines-and-policies/submission-policies/ .

In the above policy, “editor” shall mean the ACSOS program chairs.

As per these policies, all submissions should be original, i.e., they should not have been previously published in any conference proceedings, book, or journal, and should not currently be under review for another archival conference. Where relevant and appropriate, accepted papers will also be encouraged to participate in the Demo or Poster Sessions.

ACSOS organizers and all participants, including authors, should follow the IEEE code of conduct, outlined here: https://www.ieee.org/about/corporate/governance/code-of-conduct.html

ACSOS 2026 will follow a lightweight, double-blind review process that keeps author identities concealed from reviewers and vice versa. This means that author identities and affiliations should be removed from the paper for review, and that reviewers will not actively seek to identify the authors.

Authors must also make a good-faith attempt to anonymize their submissions by avoiding identifying themselves or their affiliated institutions, either explicitly or by implication, e.g., through references, acknowledgments, online repositories included with the submission, or direct interaction with committee members. Do not say "reference removed for blind review." When it is necessary to cite your own work, cite it as if it were written by a third party.

For related submissions of your own that are simultaneously under review or awaiting publication at other venues, you should use the same approach.

Publication of the submitted paper as a technical report, on your website or in an online repository like arxiv does not constitute a violation of this policy. Reviewers and the program committee will make a decision solely based on the submission and will not consider any supplementary material posted online.