This book constitutes the revised selected papers from the 14th European Conference on Multi-Agent Systems, EUMAS 2016, and the Fourth International Conference on Agreement Technologies, AT 2016, held in Valencia, Spain, in December 2016. The 43 papers and 2 invited papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 68 submissions. The papers cover thematic areas as agent and multi-agent system models, algorithms, applications, simulations, theoretical studies, and for AT the thematic areas are: algorithms

This book constitutes the revised selected papers from the 15th European Conference on Multi-Agent Systems, EUMAS 2017, and the 5th International Conference on Agreement Technologies, AT 2017, held in Evry, France, in December 2017.The 28 full papers, 3 short papers, and 2 invited papers for EUMAS and the 14 full papers and 2 short papers for AT, presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 76 submissions. The papers cover thematic areas like agent-based modelling; logic and formal methods; argumentation and rational choice; simulation; games; negotiation, planning, and coalitions; algorithms and frameworks; applications; and philosophical and theoretical studies.

This book constitutes the revised selected papers from the 13 European Conference on Multi-Agent Systems, EUMAS 2015, and the Third International Conference on Agreement Technologies, AT 2015, held in Athens, Greece, in December 2015. The 36 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 65 submissions. They are organized in topical sections named: coordination and planning; learning and optimization, argumentation and negotiation; norms, trust, and reputation; agent-based simulation and agent programming.

This book constitutes the revised post-conference proceedings of the 17th European Conference on Multi-Agent Systems, EUMAS 2020, and the 7th International Conference on Agreement Technologies, AT 2020, which were originally planned to be held as a joint event in Thessaloniki, Greece, in April 2020. Due to COVID-19 pandemic the conference was postponed to September 2020 and finally became a fully virtual conference. The 38 full papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 53 submissions. The papers report on both early and mature research and cover a wide range of topics in the field of autonomous agents and multi-agent systems.

This book constitutes the revised selected papers from the 6th International Conference on Agreement Technologies, AT 2018, held in Bergen, Norway, in December 2018. The 11 full papers and 6 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 28 submissions. The papers discuss new ideas and techniques for the design, implementation and verification of next generation open distributed systems centered on the notion of agreement among computational agents. They are organized in the following topical sections: AT foundations and modelling of reasoning agents; argumentation and negotiation; coordination in open distributed systems with applications.

For the sixth time, the German special interest group on Distributed Arti?cial Intelligence in cooperation with the Steering Committee of MATES organized the German Conference on Multiagent System Technologies – MATES 2008. This conference, which took place during September 23–26, 2008 in Kaisersla- ern, followed a series of successful predecessor conferences in Erfurt (2003, 2004, and 2006), Koblenz (2005), and Leipzig (2007). MATES 2008 was co-located with the 31st German Conference on Arti?cial Intelligence (KI 2008) and was hosted by the University of Kaiserslautern and the German Research Center for Arti?cial Intelligence (DFKI). As in recent years, MATES 2008 provided a distinguished, lively, and - terdisciplinary forum for researchers, users, and developers of agent technology to present and discuss the latest advances of research and development in the area of autonomous agents and multiagent systems. Accordingly, the topics of MATES 2008 covered the whole range: from the theory to applications of agent and multiagent technology. In all, 35 papers were submitted from authors from 11 countries. The accepted 16 full papers included in this proceedings volume and presented as talks at the conference were chosen based on a thorough and highly selective review process. Each paper was reviewed and discussed by at least three Program Committee members and revised according to their c- ments. We believe that the papers of this volume are a representative snapshot of current research and contribute to both theoretical and applied aspects of autonomous agents and multiagent systems.

Many real-world decision problems have multiple objectives. For example, when choosing a medical treatment plan, we want to maximize the efficacy of the treatment, but also minimize the side effects. These objectives typically conflict, e.g., we can often increase the efficacy of the treatment, but at the cost of more severe side effects. In this book, we outline how to deal with multiple objectives in decision-theoretic planning and reinforcement learning algorithms. To illustrate this, we employ the popular problem classes of multi-objective Markov decision processes (MOMDPs) and multi-objective coordination graphs (MO-CoGs). First, we discuss different use cases for multi-objective decision making, and why they often necessitate explicitly multi-objective algorithms. We advocate a utility-based approach to multi-objective decision making, i.e., that what constitutes an optimal solution to a multi-objective decision problem should be derived from the available information about user utility. We show how different assumptions about user utility and what types of policies are allowed lead to different solution concepts, which we outline in a taxonomy of multi-objective decision problems. Second, we show how to create new methods for multi-objective decision making using existing single-objective methods as a basis. Focusing on planning, we describe two ways to creating multi-objective algorithms: in the inner loop approach, the inner workings of a single-objective method are adapted to work with multi-objective solution concepts; in the outer loop approach, a wrapper is created around a single-objective method that solves the multi-objective problem as a series of single-objective problems. After discussing the creation of such methods for the planning setting, we discuss how these approaches apply to the learning setting. Next, we discuss three promising application domains for multi-objective decision making algorithms: energy, health, and infrastructure and transportation. Finally, we conclude by outlining important open problems and promising future directions.