The theme of ICWS 2026 is:

Agentic AI as a Service

Agentic AI systems can interpret objectives, formulate plans, invoke tools, maintain contextual memory, coordinate with people and other agents, and execute multi-step tasks.

For the ICWS community, the central question is:

How can agentic capabilities be exposed, discovered, composed, accessed, and governed as dependable Web services?

Agentic AI as a Service considers agents not as isolated applications, but as participants in an open Web ecosystem. An agent may act as a service provider, consumer, broker, coordinator, or collaborator. It may discover Web APIs, reason about their capabilities, construct an execution plan, invoke services, monitor results, and adapt when conditions change.

This development transforms Web services:

• From predefined operations to goal-oriented capabilities

• From static composition to adaptive agentic orchestration

• From isolated APIs to coordinated agent and service ecosystems

• From syntactic compatibility to semantic and behavioral interoperability

• From passive responses to proactive but accountable execution

• From service availability to dependable task completion

Realizing this vision requires advances in agent capability description, discovery, API interaction, service composition, communication protocols, identity, security, monitoring, evaluation, and human oversight.

ICWS 2026 invites researchers and practitioners to develop the open Web foundations required for interoperable and trustworthy Agentic AI as a Service.

Research Track

The Research Track welcomes original and technically rigorous contributions that advance Web service interfaces, protocols, architectures, composition methods, semantics, or engineering foundations.

Research papers should:

• Clearly define the Web-services research problem

• Explain the novelty relative to relevant literature

• Present technically sound and reproducible methods

• Provide rigorous evaluation using appropriate baselines

• Discuss limitations and threats to validity

• Demonstrate a generalizable contribution beyond one application

Application and Industry Track

The Application and Industry Track focuses on deployed Web-service systems, platform innovations, enterprise integrations, and evidence-based implementation experience.

Papers should:

• Describe a significant real-world problem

• Explain the Web architecture, interfaces, and integration approach

• Present deployment evidence or measurable outcomes

• Discuss interoperability, reliability, security, and operational constraints

• Identify lessons transferable to other environments

• Clarify the practical or system-level innovation

A new algorithm is not required. However, the paper should contribute through Web-system design, integration, deployment evidence, operational innovation, or generalizable practical knowledge.

Short Paper Track

The Short Paper Track welcomes:

• Promising early-stage research

• Novel Web-service concepts or architectures

• Emerging challenges and research visions

• Datasets, benchmarks, tools, and reusable artifacts

• Focused empirical findings or negative results

• Concise deployment and application reports

Short papers must clearly state their contribution, supporting evidence, relationship to prior work, and limitations.

Special Paper Track

The Special Paper Track addresses designated emerging topics and community priorities announced by ICWS 2026. Submissions should follow the corresponding special-track call.

All submissions must report original and unpublished work and must not be under review elsewhere at the time of submission.

Each manuscript will be reviewed by at least three program committee members. Papers will be evaluated according to:

• Relevance to ICWS

• Originality and significance

• Technical or practical quality

• Strength of evidence

• Clarity and organization

• Reproducibility

• Research or real-world impact

Papers should position their contributions accurately within the relevant international literature. Authors are encouraged to cite ICWS and other conferences or journals when genuinely relevant. Citation of any particular venue is not required.

Research Track and Application and Industry Track manuscripts are limited to 15 pages in the Springer LNCS format. Short Paper Track manuscripts are limited to 8 pages. Authors may purchase up to two additional pages, subject to the applicable publication fee.

Authors must use the official Springer LNCS templates:

• Microsoft Word template

• LaTeX template

Electronic submission in PDF or Word format is required. Manuscripts that do not follow the required format or exceed the permitted page limit may be returned without review.

At least one author of each accepted paper must register for ICWS 2026 and present the paper at the conference.

Research Track

Submit to the ICWS 2026 Research Track: https://edas.info/newPaper.php?c=34935&track=136064

Application and Industry Track

Submit to the ICWS 2026 Application and Industry Track: https://edas.info/newPaper.php?c=34935&track=136063

Short Paper Track

Submit to the ICWS 2026 Short Paper Track: https://edas.info/newPaper.php?c=34935&track=136065

Special Paper Track

Submit to the ICWS 2026 Special Paper Track: https://edas.info/newPaper.php?c=34935&track=136066

Accepted and presented ICWS 2026 papers will be published in the conference proceedings, which are scheduled to appear in Springer’s Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series.

Springer makes LNCS proceedings available to major abstracting and indexing services. Final inclusion is determined by the policies and selection criteria of each indexing service.

Under the current SCF publication arrangement, the proceedings are expected to become freely accessible through SpringerLink four years after publication.

Extended versions of selected papers may be invited to partner journals. Such submissions must contain substantial extensions and will undergo independent editorial and peer review.

ICWS 2026 will recognize outstanding contributions through:

• Best Paper Award

• Best Student Paper Award

For the Best Student Paper Award, the first author must be a full-time student.

The first International Conference on Web Services was held in Las Vegas, USA, in June 2003. ICWS-Europe 2003 followed in Germany and evolved into the European Conference on Web Services in 2004.

Recent ICWS conferences were held in Seattle in 2018, San Diego in 2019, virtually in 2020 and 2021, Hawaii in 2022, Honolulu with satellite sessions in Shenzhen in 2023, Bangkok in 2024, and Hong Kong in 2025.

ICWS 2026 continues this academic tradition while opening a new research frontier centered on the Web foundations of Agentic AI as a Service.

ICWS is a founding member of the Smart Computing Frontier, a federation of ten co-located international conferences.

Within SCF, ICWS focuses specifically on the Web layer through which smart capabilities are published, discovered, accessed, composed, and coordinated.

Its scope is complementary to the other SCF conferences:

• SCC: service engineering, lifecycle management, and value creation

• CLOUD: cloud infrastructure, platforms, and resource management

• BigData: large-scale data systems and analytics

• AIMS: AI models, multimodal intelligence, and AI-enabled services

• EDGE: computing near data sources and users

• ICIOT: connected devices, sensing, and physical action

• ICCC: cognitive computing

• ICBC: blockchain and decentralized trust

METAVERSE: immersive and spatial digital environments