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.

The Multi-Agent Based Beam Search (MABBS) method systematically integrates four major requirements of manufacturing production - representation capability, solution quality, computation efficiency, and implementation difficulty - within a unified framework to deal with the many challenges of complex real-world production planning and scheduling problems. Multi-agent Based Beam Search for Real-time Production Scheduling and Control introduces this method, together with its software implementation and industrial applications. This book connects academic research with industrial practice, and develops a practical solution to production planning and scheduling problems. To simplify implementation, a reusable software platform is developed to build the MABBS method into a generic computation engine. This engine is integrated with a script language, called the Embedded Extensible Application Script Language (EXASL), to provide a flexible and straightforward approach to representing complex real-world problems. Adopting an in-depth yet engaging and clear approach, and avoiding confusing or complicated mathematics and formulas, this book presents simple heuristics and a user-friendly software platform for system modelling. The supporting industrial case studies provide key information for students, lecturers, and industry practitioners alike. Multi-agent Based Beam Search for Real-time Production Scheduling and Control offers insights into the complex nature of and a practical total solution to production planning and scheduling, and inspires further research and practice in this promising research area.

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.

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.

Studies on robotics applications have grown substantially in recent years, with swarm robotics being a relatively new area of research. Inspired by studies in swarm intelligence and robotics, swarm robotics facilitates interactions between robots as well as their interactions with the environment. The Handbook of Research on Design, Control, and Modeling of Swarm Robotics is a collection of the most important research achievements in swarm robotics thus far, covering the growing areas of design, control, and modeling of swarm robotics. This handbook serves as an essential resource for researchers, engineers, graduates, and senior undergraduates with interests in swarm robotics and its applications.

This book collects the most significant literature on agents in an attempt top forge a broad foundation for the field. Includes papers from the perspectives of AI, databases, distributed computing, and programming languages. The book will be of interest to programmers and developers, especially in Internet areas.

Intelligent computing refers greatly to artificial intelligence with the aim at making computer to act as a human. This newly developed area of real-time intelligent computing integrates the aspect of dynamic environments with the human intelligence. This book presents a comprehensive practical and easy to read account which describes current state-of-the art in designing and implementing real-time intelligent computing to robotics, alert systems, IoT, remote access control, multi-agent systems, networking, mobile smart systems, crowd sourcing, broadband systems, cloud computing, streaming data and many other applications areas. The solutions discussed in this book will encourage the researchers and IT professional to put the methods into their practice.