This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Practical Applications of Scalable Multi-Agent Systems, PAAMS 2017, held in Porto, Portugal, in June 2017. The 11 revised full papers, 11 short papers, and 17 Demo papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 63 submissions. The papers report on the application and validation of agent-based models, methods, and technologies in a number of key application areas, including day life and real world, energy and networks, human and trust, markets and bids, models and tools, negotiation and conversation, scalability and resources.

Minnesota has a unique role in U.S. water policy. Hydrologically, it is a state with more than 12,000 lakes, an inland sea, and the headwaters of three major river systems: the St Lawrence, the Red River of the North, and the Mississippi. Institutionally, Minnesota is also unique. All U.S. states use Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) approaches to addressing impaired waters. Every TMDL requires a substantial investment of resources, including data collection, modeling, stakeholder input and analysis, a watershed management plan, as well as process and impact monitoring. Minnesota is the only state in the union that has passed legislation (the 2007 Clean Water Legacy Act) providing significant resources to support the TMDL process. The book will be an excellent guide for policymakers and decision makers who are interested in learning about alternative approaches to water management. Non-governmental organizations interested in stimulating effective water quality policy will also find this a helpful resource. Finally, there are similarities between the lessons learned in Minnesota and the goals of water policy in several other states and nations, where there are competing uses of water for households, agriculture, recreation, and navigation.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th IFIP WG 12.5 International Conference on Artificial Intelligence Applications and Innovations, AIAI 2013, held in Paphos, Cyprus, in September/October 2013. The 26 revised full papers presented together with a keynote speech at the main event and 44 papers of 8 collocated workshops were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the volume. The papers of the main event are organized in topical sections on data mining, medical informatics and biomedical engineering, problem solving and scheduling, modeling and decision support systems, robotics, and intelligent signal and image processing.