This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Central and European Conference on Multi-Agent Systems, CEEMAS 2003, held in Prague, Czech Republic in June 2003. The 58 revised full papers presented together with 3 invited contributions were carefully reviewed and selected from 109 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on formal methods, social knowledge and meta-reasoning, negotiation, and policies, ontologies and languages, planning, coalitions, evolution and emergent behaviour, platforms, protocols, security, real-time and synchronization, industrial applications, e-business and virtual enterprises, and Web and mobile agents.

Five years ago, with excitement and uncertainty, we witnessed the birth of PRIMA (Paci?c Rim International Workshop on Multi-Agents). The ?rst PRIMA in 1998 has now grown into PRIMA 2003, the 6th Paci?c Rim Inter- tional Workshop on Multi-Agents in Seoul, Korea. During a period of ?ve years, the notion of agent research has grown so much that we hear the term agent on a daily basis. Various ?elds such as business, the Web, software engineering, on-line games and such are now using the term agent as a placeholder, just like the term object is used in the object-oriented paradigm. On the other hand, the research area has extended toward real applications, such as the Semantic Web and ubiquitous computing. The themes of PRIMA 2003 re?ected the following trends: – agent-based electronic commerce, auctions and markets – agent architectures and their applications – agent communication languages, dialog and interaction protocols – agent ontologies – agent programming languages, frameworks and toolkits – agentcities – agents and grid computing – agents and peer computing –agentsandtheSemanticWeb – agents and Web services – arti?cial social systems – con?ict resolution and negotiation – evaluation of multi-agent systems – languages and techniques for describing (multi-)agent systems – meta modeling and meta reasoning – multi-agent planning and learning – multi-agent systems and their applications – social reasoning, agent modeling, and organization – standards for agents and multi-agent systems – teams and coalitions – ubiquitous agents

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 volume presents a collection of original research works by leading specialists focusing on novel and promising approaches in which the multi-agent system paradigm is used to support, enhance or replace traditional approaches to solving difficult optimization problems. The editors have invited several well-known specialists to present their solutions, tools, and models falling under the common denominator of the agent-based optimization. The book consists of eight chapters covering examples of application of the multi-agent paradigm and respective customized tools to solve difficult optimization problems arising in different areas such as machine learning, scheduling, transportation and, more generally, distributed and cooperative problem solving.

This volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference on Industrial Applications of Holonic and Multi-Agent Systems held in September 2007. The 39 full papers were selected from among 63 submissions. They are organized into topical sections covering theoretical and methodological issues, algorithms and technologies, implementation and validation, applications, and supply chain management.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Multi-Agent-Based Simulation, MABS 2003, held in Melbourne, Australia as part of AAMAS 2003. The 11 revised full papers presented together with 3 invited papers were carefully selected during two rounds of reviewing and improvement. The papers are organized in topical sections on MABS techniques for MAS; economics, exchange, and influence in virtual worlds; MABS techniques for real-world modelling, and understanding and classifying MABS.

Autonomous agents and multi-agent systems are computational systems in which several (semi-)autonomous agents interact with each other or work together to perform some set of tasks or satisfy some set of goals. These systems may involve computational agents that are homogeneous or heterogeneous, they may involve activities on the part of agents having common or distinct goals, and they may involve participation on the part of humans and intelligent agents. This volume contains selected papers from PRIMA 2002, the 5th Paci?c Rim International Workshop on Multi-Agents, held in Tokyo, Japan, on August 18–19, 2002 in conjunction with the 7th Paci?c Rim International Conference on Arti?cial Intelligence (PRICAI-02). PRIMA is a series of workshops on - tonomous agents and multi-agent systems, integrating activities in the Asian and Paci?c Rim countries. PRIMA 2002 built on the great success of its pre- cessors, PRIMA’98 in Singapore, PRIMA’99 in Kyoto, Japan, PRIMA 2000 in Melbourne, Australia, and PRIMA 2001 in Taipei, Taiwan. We received 35 submissions to this workshop from 10 countries. Each paper was reviewed by three internationally renowned program committee members. After careful reviews, 15 papers were selected for this volume. We would like to thank all the authors who submitted papers to the workshop. We would also like to thank all the program committee members for their splendid work in reviewing the papers. Finally, we thank the editorial sta? of Springer-Verlag for publishing this volume in the Lecture Notes in Arti?cial Intelligence.