Solving complex problems in real-world contexts, such as financial investment planning or mining large data collections, involves many different sub-tasks, each of which requires different techniques. To deal with such problems, a great diversity of intelligent techniques are available, including traditional techniques like expert systems approaches and soft computing techniques like fuzzy logic, neural networks, or genetic algorithms. These techniques are complementary approaches to intelligent information processing rather than competing ones, and thus better results in problem solving are achieved when these techniques are combined in hybrid intelligent systems. Multi-Agent Systems are ideally suited to model the manifold interactions among the many different components of hybrid intelligent systems. This book introduces agent-based hybrid intelligent systems and presents a framework and methodology allowing for the development of such systems for real-world applications. The authors focus on applications in financial investment planning and data mining.

Solving complex problems in real-world contexts, such as financial investment planning or mining large data collections, involves many different sub-tasks, each of which requires different techniques. To deal with such problems, a great diversity of intelligent techniques are available, including traditional techniques like expert systems approaches and soft computing techniques like fuzzy logic, neural networks, or genetic algorithms. These techniques are complementary approaches to intelligent information processing rather than competing ones, and thus better results in problem solving are achieved when these techniques are combined in hybrid intelligent systems. Multi-Agent Systems are ideally suited to model the manifold interactions among the many different components of hybrid intelligent systems.This book introduces agent-based hybrid intelligent systems and presents a framework and methodology allowing for the development of such systems for real-world applications. The authors focus on applications in financial investment planning and data mining.

From the Foreword: "This book exemplifies one of the most successful approaches to modeling and simulating [the] new generation of complex systems. FLAME was designed to make the building of large scale complex systems models straightforward and the simulation code that it generates is highly efficient and can be run on any modern technology. FLAME was the first such platform that ran efficiently on high performance parallel computers and a version for GPU technology is also available. At its heart, and the reason why it is so efficient and robust, is the use of a powerful computational model ‘Communicating X-machines’ which is general enough to cope with most types of modelling problems. As well as being increasingly important in academic research, FLAME is now being applied in industry in many different application areas. This book describes the basics of FLAME and is illustrated with numerous examples." —Professor Mike Holcombe, University of Sheffield, UK Agent-based models have shown applications in various fields such as biology, economics, and social science. Over the years, multiple agent-based modeling frameworks have been produced, allowing experts with non-computing background to easily write and simulate their models. However, most of these models are limited by the capability of the framework, the time it takes for a simulation to finish, or how to handle the massive amounts of data produced. FLAME (Flexible Large-scale Agent-based Modeling Environment) was produced and developed through the years to address these issues. This book contains a comprehensive summary of the field, covers the basics of FLAME, and shows how concepts of X-machines, can be stretched across multiple fields to produce agent models. It has been written with several audiences in mind. First, it is organized as a collection of models, with detailed descriptions of how models can be designed, especially for beginners. A number of theoretical aspects of software engineering and how they relate to agent-based models are discussed for students interested in software engineering and parallel computing. Finally, it is intended as a guide to developers from biology, economics, and social science, who want to explore how to write agent-based models for their research area. By working through the model examples provided, anyone should be able to design and build agent-based models and deploy them. With FLAME, they can easily increase the agent number and run models on parallel computers, in order to save on simulation complexity and waiting time for results. Because the field is so large and active, the book does not aim to cover all aspects of agent-based modeling and its research challenges. The models are presented to show researchers how they can build complex agent functions for their models. The book demonstrates the advantage of using agent-based models in simulation experiments, providing a case to move away from differential equations and build more reliable, close to real, models. The Open Access version of this book, available at https://doi.org/10.1201/9781315370729, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Workshop on Autonomous Intelligent Systems: Agents and Data Mining, AIS-ADM 2005, held in St. Petersburg, Russia in June 2005. The 17 revised full papers presented together with 5 invited papers and the abstract of an invited talk were carefully reviewed and selected from 29 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on agent-based data mining issues, ontologies and Web mining, and applications and case studies.

Decision makers in large scale interconnected network systems require simulation models for decision support. The behaviour of these systems is determined by many actors, situated in a dynamic, multi-actor, multi-objective and multi-level environment. How can such systems be modelled and how can the socio-technical complexity be captured? Agent-based modelling is a proven approach to handle this challenge. This book provides a practical introduction to agent-based modelling of socio-technical systems, based on a methodology that has been developed at TU Delft and which has been deployed in a large number of case studies. The book consists of two parts: the first presents the background, theory and methodology as well as practical guidelines and procedures for building models. In the second part this theory is applied to a number of case studies, where for each model the development steps are presented extensively, preparing the reader for creating own models.