Challenges arise when the size of a group of cooperating agents is scaled to hundreds or thousands of members. In domains such as space exploration, military and disaster response, groups of this size (or larger) are required to achieve extremely complex, distributed goals. To effectively and efficiently achieve their goals, members of a group need to cohesively follow a joint course of action while remaining flexible to unforeseen developments in the environment. Coordination of Large-Scale Multiagent Systems provides extensive coverage of the latest research and novel solutions being developed in the field. It describes specific systems, such as SERSE and WIZER, as well as general approaches based on game theory, optimization and other more theoretical frameworks. It will be of interest to researchers in academia and industry, as well as advanced-level students.

Discover the latest developments in multi-robot coordination techniques with this insightful and original resource Multi-Agent Coordination: A Reinforcement Learning Approach delivers a comprehensive, insightful, and unique treatment of the development of multi-robot coordination algorithms with minimal computational burden and reduced storage requirements when compared to traditional algorithms. The accomplished academics, engineers, and authors provide readers with both a high-level introduction to, and overview of, multi-robot coordination, and in-depth analyses of learning-based planning algorithms. You'll learn about how to accelerate the exploration of the team-goal and alternative approaches to speeding up the convergence of TMAQL by identifying the preferred joint action for the team. The authors also propose novel approaches to consensus Q-learning that address the equilibrium selection problem and a new way of evaluating the threshold value for uniting empires without imposing any significant computation overhead. Finally, the book concludes with an examination of the likely direction of future research in this rapidly developing field. Readers will discover cutting-edge techniques for multi-agent coordination, including: An introduction to multi-agent coordination by reinforcement learning and evolutionary algorithms, including topics like the Nash equilibrium and correlated equilibrium Improving convergence speed of multi-agent Q-learning for cooperative task planning Consensus Q-learning for multi-agent cooperative planning The efficient computing of correlated equilibrium for cooperative q-learning based multi-agent planning A modified imperialist competitive algorithm for multi-agent stick-carrying applications Perfect for academics, engineers, and professionals who regularly work with multi-agent learning algorithms, Multi-Agent Coordination: A Reinforcement Learning Approach also belongs on the bookshelves of anyone with an advanced interest in machine learning and artificial intelligence as it applies to the field of cooperative or competitive robotics.

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.

An introduction to multiagent systems and contemporary distributed artificial intelligence, this text provides coverage of basic topics as well as closely-related ones. It emphasizes aspects of both theory and application and includes exercises of varying degrees of difficulty.

Noisy optimization is a topic of growing interest for researchers working on mainstream optimization problems. Although several techniques for dealing with stochastic noise in optimization problems are covered in journals and conference proceedings, today there are virtually no books that approach noisy optimization from a layman’s perspective; this book remedies that gap. Beginning with the foundations of evolutionary optimization, the book subsequently explores the principles of noisy optimization in single and multi-objective settings, and presents detailed illustrations of the principles developed for application in real-world multi-agent coordination problems. Special emphasis is given to the design of intelligent algorithms for noisy optimization in real-time applications. The book is unique in terms of its content, writing style and above all its simplicity, which will appeal to readers with a broad range of backgrounds. The book is divided into 7 chapters, the first of which provides an introduction to Swarm and Evolutionary Optimization algorithms. Chapter 2 includes a thorough review of agent architectures for multi-agent coordination. In turn, Chapter 3 provides an extensive review of noisy optimization, while Chapter 4 addresses issues of noise handling in the context of single-objective optimization problems. An illustrative case study on multi-robot path-planning in the presence of measurement noise is also highlighted in this chapter. Chapter 5 deals with noisy multi-objective optimization and includes a case study on noisy multi-robot box-pushing. In Chapter 6, the authors examine the scope of various algorithms in noisy optimization problems. Lastly, Chapter 7 summarizes the main results obtained in the previous chapters and elaborates on the book’s potential with regard to real-world noisy optimization problems.