The origins of evolutionary computation can be traced back to the late 1950's where it remained, almost unknown, to the broader scientific community for three decades until the 1980's when it started to receive significant attention, as did the study of multi-agent systems (MAS). This focuses on systems in which many intelligent agents interact with each other. Today these systems are not simply a research topic but are also beginning to become an important subject of academic teaching and industrial and commercial application. Co-Evolutionary Computational and Multi-Agent Systems introduces the author's recent work in these two new and important branches of artificial intelligence.

This book addresses agent-based computing, concentrating in particular on evolutionary multi-agent systems (EMAS), which have been developed since 1996 at the AGH University of Science and Technology in Cracow, Poland. It provides the relevant background information on and a detailed description of this computing paradigm, along with key experimental results. Readers will benefit from the insightful discussion, which primarily concerns the efficient implementation of computing frameworks for developing EMAS and similar computing systems, as well as a detailed formal model. Theoretical deliberations demonstrating that computing with EMAS always helps to find the optimal solution are also included, rounding out the coverage.

"This book compiles numerous ongoing projects and research efforts in the design of agents in light of recent development in neurocognitive science and quantum physics, providing readers with interdisciplinary applications of multi-agents systems, ranging from economics to engineering"--Provided by publisher.

Agent based evolutionary search is an emerging paradigm in computational int- ligence offering the potential to conceptualize and solve a variety of complex problems such as currency trading, production planning, disaster response m- agement, business process management etc. There has been a significant growth in the number of publications related to the development and applications of agent based systems in recent years which has prompted special issues of journals and dedicated sessions in premier conferences. The notion of an agent with its ability to sense, learn and act autonomously - lows the development of a plethora of efficient algorithms to deal with complex problems. This notion of an agent differs significantly from a restrictive definition of a solution in an evolutionary algorithm and opens up the possibility to model and capture emergent behavior of complex systems through a natural age- oriented decomposition of the problem space. While this flexibility of represen- tion offered by agent based systems is widely acknowledged, they need to be - signed for specific purposes capturing the right level of details and description. This edited volume is aimed to provide the readers with a brief background of agent based evolutionary search, recent developments and studies dealing with various levels of information abstraction and applications of agent based evo- tionary systems. There are 12 peer reviewed chapters in this book authored by d- tinguished researchers who have shared their experience and findings spanning across a wide range of applications.

This Festschrift volume is published in honor of Takao Terano on the occasion of his retirement. Takao Terano is a leading expert in the areas of agent-based modelling, knowledge systems, evolutionary computation, and service science.The contributions in this volume reflect the breadth and impact of his work. The volume contains 12 full papers related to Takao Terano’s research. They deal with various aspects of artificial intelligence, multi-agent systems, collaborative and social computing, social networks, ubiquitous computing.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the First International Workshop on Learning and Adaption in Multi-Agent Systems, LAMAS 2005, held in The Netherlands, in July 2005, as an associated event of AAMAS 2005. The 13 revised papers presented together with two invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from the lectures given at the workshop.