This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Radical Agent Concepts, WRAC 2005, held in Greenbelt, MD, USA in September 2005. The 27 full papers presented are fully revised to incorporate reviewers' comments and discussions at the workshop. Topics addressed are social aspects of agents, agent architectures, autonomic systems, agent communities, and agent intelligence.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Radical Agent Concepts, WRAC 2005, held in Greenbelt, MD, USA in September 2005. The 27 full papers presented are fully revised to incorporate reviewers' comments and discussions at the workshop. Topics addressed are social aspects of agents, agent architectures, autonomic systems, agent communities, and agent intelligence.

"This book presents relevant theoretical frameworks and most recent research findings in this area, providing significant theories for research students and scholars to carry out their continuous research as well as practitioners who aim to improve upon their understanding of distributed production planning"--

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the First International Workshop on Radical Agent Concepts, WRAC 2002, held in McLean, VA, USA in January 2002. The 32 revised full papers presented together with an invited article, 6 poster papers, and 2 panel reports were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. The papers are organized in topical sections on adaptation and learning, agent-based software engineering, agent architectures, agent communication and coordination, and innovative applications.

Service orientation is emerging nowadays at multiple organizational levels in enterprise business, and it leverages technology in response to the growing need for greater business integration, flexibility and agility of manufacturing enterprises. The Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) analysed throughout the book represents a technical architecture, a business modelling concept, a type of infrastructure, an integration source and a new way of viewing units of automation within the enterprise. The primary goal of SOA is to align the business world with the world of information technology in a way that makes both more effective. The service value creation model at enterprise level consists of using a Service Component Architecture for business process applications, based on entities which handle services. In this view a service is a piece of software encapsulating the business/control logic or resource functionality of an enterprise entity that exhibits an individual competence and responds to a specific request to fulfil a local (operation) or global objective (batch production). The value creation model is based on a 2-stage approach: • Agentification: complex manufacturing processes are split in services provided by informational agents which are discovered, accessed and executed. This leads to a modular, reusable, agile and easy integrate integration. • Holonification: holons link the material flow and physical entities of the manufacturing processes with the informational part (IT services realized by distributed intelligence) facilitating thus traceability the developing of flexible control systems. This book gathers contributions from scientists, researchers and industrialists on concepts, methods, frameworks and implementing issues addressing trends in the service orientation of control technology and management applied to manufacturing enterprise. This book gathers contributions from scientists, researchers and industrialists on concepts, methods, frameworks and implementing issues addressing trends in the service orientation of control technology and management applied to manufacturing enterprise.

The purpose of this volume is to present current work of the Intelligent Computer Graphics community, a community growing up year after year. This volume is a kind of continuation of the previously published Springer volume “Artificial Int- ligence Techniques for Computer Graphics”. Nowadays, intelligent techniques are more and more used in Computer Graphics in order, not only to optimise the pr- essing time, but also to find more accurate solutions for a lot of Computer Gra- ics problems, than with traditional methods. What are intelligent techniques for Computer Graphics? Mainly, they are te- niques based on Artificial Intelligence. So, problem resolution (especially constraint satisfaction) techniques, as well as evolutionary techniques, are used in Declarative scene Modelling; heuristic search techniques, as well as strategy games techniques, are currently used in scene understanding and in virtual world exploration; multi-agent techniques and evolutionary algorithms are used in behavioural animation; and so on. However, even if in most cases the used intelligent techniques are due to Artificial - telligence, sometimes, simple human intelligence can find interesting solutions in cases where traditional Computer Graphics techniques, even combined with Artificial Intelligence ones, cannot propose any satisfactory solution. A good example of such a case is the one of scene understanding, in the case where several parts of the scene are impossible to access.

Question answering (QA) has become one of the fastest growing topics in computational linguistics and information access. To advance research in the area of dialogue-based question answering, we propose a combination of methods from different scientific fields (i.e., Information Retrieval, Dialogue Systems, Semantic Web, and Machine Learning). This book sheds light on adaptable dialogue-based question answering. We demonstrate the technical and computational feasibility of the proposed ideas, the introspective methods in particular, by beginning with an extensive introduction to the dialogical problem domain which motivates the technical implementation. The ideas have been carried out in a mature natural language processing (NLP) system, the SmartWeb dialogue system, which was developed between 2004 and 2007 by partners from academia and industry. We have attempted to make this book a self-containing text and provide an extra section on the interdisciplinary scientific background. The target audience for this book comprises of researchers and students interested in the application potential of semantic technologies for difficult AI tasks such as working dialogue and QA systems.