A detailed account of real-time systems, including program structures for real-time, phases development analysis, and formal specification and verification methods of reactive systems. The book brings together the 3 key fields of current and future data-processing: distributed systems and applications, parallel scientific computing, and real-time and manufacturing systems. It covers the basic concepts and theories, methods, techniques and tools currently used in the specification and implementation of applications and contains many examples plus complete case studies.

A detailed account of real-time systems, including program structures for real-time, phases development analysis, and formal specification and verification methods of reactive systems. The book brings together the 3 key fields of current and future data-processing: distributed systems and applications, parallel scientific computing, and real-time and manufacturing systems. It covers the basic concepts and theories, methods, techniques and tools currently used in the specification and implementation of applications and contains many examples plus complete case studies.

This book provides an overview of multi-agent systems and several applications that have been developed for real-world problems. Multi-agent systems is an area of distributed artificial intelligence that emphasizes the joint behaviors of agents with some degree of autonomy and the complexities arising from their interactions. Multi-agent systems allow the subproblems of a constraint satisfaction problem to be subcontracted to different problem solving agents with their own interest and goals. This increases the speed, creates parallelism and reduces the risk of system collapse on a single point of failure. Different multi-agent architectures, that are tailor-made for a specific application are possible. They are able to synergistically combine the various computational intelligent techniques for attaining a superior performance. This gives an opportunity for bringing the advantages of various techniques into a single framework. It also provides the freedom to model the behavior of the system to be as competitive or coordinating, each having its own advantages and disadvantages.

Simulation and Decision Making, Multi-Agent Applications, Management and e-Business, Mobile Agents and Robots, and Machine Learning. In addition to the main tracks of the symposium there were the following five special sessions: Agent- Based Optimization (ABO2010), Agent-Enabled Social Computing (AESC2010), Digital Economy (DE2010), Using Intelligent Systems for Information Technology Assessment (ISITA2010) and a Doctoral Track. Accepted and presented papers highlight new trends and challenges in agent and multi-agent research. We hope these results will be of value to the research com- nity working in the fields of artificial intelligence, collective computational intel- gence, robotics, machine learning and, in particular, agent and multi-agent systems technologies and applications. We would like to express our sincere thanks to the Honorary Chairs, Romuald Cwilewicz, President of the Gdynia Maritime University, Poland, and Lakhmi C. Jain, University of South Australia, Australia, for their support. Our special thanks go to the Local Organizing Committee chaired by Ireneusz Czarnowski, who did very solid and excellent work. Thanks are due to the Program Co-chairs, all Program and Reviewer Committee members and all the additional - viewers for their valuable efforts in the review process, which helped us to guarantee the highest quality of selected papers for the conference. We cordially thank the - ganizers and chairs of special sessions, which essentially contributed to the success of the conference.

Methodological Guidelines for Modeling and Developing MAS-Based Simulations The intersection of agents, modeling, simulation, and application domains has been the subject of active research for over two decades. Although agents and simulation have been used effectively in a variety of application domains, much of the supporting research remains scattered in the literature, too often leaving scientists to develop multi-agent system (MAS) models and simulations from scratch. Multi-Agent Systems: Simulation and Applications provides an overdue review of the wide ranging facets of MAS simulation, including methodological and application-oriented guidelines. This comprehensive resource reviews two decades of research in the intersection of MAS, simulation, and different application domains. It provides scientists and developers with disciplined engineering approaches to modeling and developing MAS-based simulations. After providing an overview of the field’s history and its basic principles, as well as cataloging the various simulation engines for MAS, the book devotes three sections to current and emerging approaches and applications. Simulation for MAS — explains simulation support for agent decision making, the use of simulation for the design of self-organizing systems, the role of software architecture in simulating MAS, and the use of simulation for studying learning and stigmergic interaction. MAS for Simulation — discusses an agent-based framework for symbiotic simulation, the use of country databases and expert systems for agent-based modeling of social systems, crowd-behavior modeling, agent-based modeling and simulation of adult stem cells, and agents for traffic simulation. Tools — presents a number of representative platforms and tools for MAS and simulation, including Jason, James II, SeSAm, and RoboCup Rescue. Complete with over 200 figures and formulas, this reference book provides the necessary overview of experiences with MAS simulation and the tools needed to exploit simulation in MAS for future research in a vast array of applications including home security, computational systems biology, and traffic management.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Central and Eastern European Conference on Multi-Agent Systems, CEEMAS 2007, held in Leipzig, Germany, September 25-27, 2007. The 29 revised full papers and 17 revised short papers presented together with an invited paper were carefully reviewed and selected from 84 submissions. The papers cover a wide range of areas.

New object-oriented technologies have been conceived and implemented over the past decade in order to manage complexity inherent in information systems development. Research has spanned from information systems modelling languages (UML and OML) to databases (ODMG), from programming languages (Java) to middleware technology (CORBA). A more widespread use of the Internet has led to the emergence and integration of various other technologies, such as XML and database connectivity tools, allowing businesses to access and exchange information over the Internet. The main theme of OOIS 2000 was "Object-Technology and New Business Opportunities" and focused on research conducted in the area of effective information systems development for the promotion of e-commerce. Papers were invited from academics and practitioners. The thirty-nine papers accepted for oms 2000 are included in these proceedings. It is nice to see this year that the shift from centralised to distributed systems and the widespread access and use of the Internet has allowed the advent of new opportunities for businesses to exploit, in the form of e-commerce.