Background
This is an Era for a Digital Economy. The Web is rapidly developing towards an environment that is physically distributed; control decentralised and run by self-motivated software systems. This provides a unique and exciting opportunity that could potentially revolutionise entirely the conventional ways of doing business.

In parallel, the Internet has attracted a critical mass of subscriptions, from both businesses and individuals, where the Internet is used for information exchange, facilitating collaboration and cooperation, and carrying out e-Commerce and e-Business activities. Virtual organisations and automated e-commerce operations are a reality today. However, true autonomous trading systems that have full decision-making power rather than limited pre-determined operations are not available yet.

What are the relevant business and technological obstacles in achieving this? What are the make and break factors? What business intelligences are needed in such autonomous business systems? What types of system architecture are suitable for facilitating and encouraging such autonomous business systems? Can e-Commerce and supply chains be fully automated? Are trust and security issues an obstacle for such automated systems? What are the existing technologies that one can draw on to overcome these obstacles? Can semantics-based technologies capture and enrich the relevant business knowledge thus enhance the decision making power and capabilities of such autonomous systems? Are (logical) reasoning mechanisms helpful? If so, what are their strengths and weakness? What types of system architectures are suitable, e.g. from a complete peer to peer architecture to a tightly (controlled) controlled systems, for creating ideal electronic environment for a virtual e-commerce market? What are their strengths and weakness?

In addition, the underlying computational platforms where business applications may be developed upon and run from, e.g. peer-to-peer, cloud and high-performance computing environments, do they play a role? The increasingly popular non-conventional column-based databases and business intelligence techniques that are commonly used to process and analyse big data, do they play a role in the digital economy? If so, how they may influence and shape today’s and tomorrow’s businesses?

Topics
This special session welcome reports on computational, business and social issues related to the above topics. It will focus on recent research and application results.
A list of interested topics for this session, but not limited to, is provided below:
• Vision on novel advances of automated intelligent business agents and e- Commerce
• Technologies and applications on Business Intelligence
• Modeling and simulation of business processes
• Novel business models and automations in the Digital Economy
• Business ontologies for Digital Economy
• Social impact and interactions in Digital Economy
• Service Oriented Architecture for business processes
• e-Supply Chains
• e-Logistics
• Supply Chain Configuration
• Agile Supply Chains
• Supply Chain Event Management
• e-Procurement
• e-Sourcing
• Vision and discussion papers on Digital Economy
• e-Business standards
• Enterprise Architecture and implementation issues
• Interaction, collaboration and negotiation models
• Trading agents
• Risk and knowledge management
• Semantic Web technologies
• Dynamic organisational issues and distributed agents
• Scalability issues in (fully) automated trading environments
• Real-world applications and business scenarios
• Computational platforms for supporting Digital Economy
• Very large databases for Digital Economy

Instructions for Authors
Submissions must be formatted according to the instructions which can be found on the Springer website http://www.springer.com/series/11156 under "Instructions for Authors".
Papers must be submitted in PDF format for review purposes, but authors are required to upload editable word-processor files (LaTeX or MS Word) at the end of the review process.
The required paper length is 10 pages in publisher format. Papers longer than this may be subject to an additional charge. Papers much longer or shorter than the required length may be rejected, at the decision of the organisers.
Papers to be considered for the conference must be submitted in PDF form through the PROSE online submission and review system available http://amsta-14.kesinternational.org/prose.php

Publication
The conference proceedings will be published by Springer in their Advances in Intelligent and Soft Computing series, index/abstracted in ISI Proceedings, DBLP. Ulrich's, EI-Compendex, SCOPUS, Zentralblatt Math, MetaPress and Springerlink..
Important Dates
Submission of papers: ext. to 15 Feb. 2014
Notification of acceptance: 25 Feb. 2014
Upload of publication files (PDF file and DOC or TEX files): 10 Mar. 2014

Special Session Chairs
• Dr. Arkadiusz Kawa, The Poznań University of Economics, Poland, arkadiusz.kawa@ue.poznan.pl
• Dr. Yun-Heh (Jessica) Chen-Burger, The Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, UK, y.j.chenburger@hw.ac.uk
• Dr. Konrad Fuks, The Poznań University of Economics, Poland, konrad.fuks@ue.poznan.pl