This book is devoted to the design and analysis of techniques enabling intelligent and dynamic cooperation and communication among agents in a distributed environment. A flexible theoretical formalism is developed in detail and it is demonstrated how this approach can be used for the design of agent architectures in practice. The formal part of this work is based on a variant of the BDI logic introduced by Georgeff and Rao. This book, for the first time, outlines this formalism in some depth. The most important practical benefit provided is the concept of cooperation protocols allowing the representation of various methods of cooperation and possible patterns of dialogue.

The study of multi-agent systems (MAS) focuses on systems in which many intelligent agents interact with each other. These agents are considered to be autonomous entities such as software programs or robots. Their interactions can either be cooperative (for example as in an ant colony) or selfish (as in a free market economy). This book assumes only basic knowledge of algorithms and discrete maths, both of which are taught as standard in the first or second year of computer science degree programmes. A basic knowledge of artificial intelligence would useful to help understand some of the issues, but is not essential. The book’s main aims are: To introduce the student to the concept of agents and multi-agent systems, and the main applications for which they are appropriate To introduce the main issues surrounding the design of intelligent agents To introduce the main issues surrounding the design of a multi-agent society To introduce a number of typical applications for agent technology After reading the book the student should understand: The notion of an agent, how agents are distinct from other software paradigms (e.g. objects) and the characteristics of applications that lend themselves to agent-oriented software The key issues associated with constructing agents capable of intelligent autonomous action and the main approaches taken to developing such agents The key issues in designing societies of agents that can effectively cooperate in order to solve problems, including an understanding of the key types of multi-agent interactions possible in such systems The main application areas of agent-based systems

Adaptive Agents and Multi-Agent Systems is an emerging and exciting interdisciplinary area of research and development involving artificial intelligence, computer science, software engineering, and developmental biology, as well as cognitive and social science. This book surveys the state of the art in this emerging field by drawing together thoroughly selected reviewed papers from two related workshops; as well as papers by leading researchers specifically solicited for this book. The articles are organized into topical sections on - learning, cooperation, and communication - emergence and evolution in multi-agent systems - theoretical foundations of adaptive agents

A first attempt to develop a standardized agent communication language (ACL) resulted in KQML, probably the most widely used such language. However, a lot of technical work remains to be done. Even worse, so far, there seems to be little consensus on the basics of agent communication and there is no clear understanding of the semantics of individual speech acts or even of the basic concepts that should be used to define the semantics. This book documents two workshops on communication in MAS held in 1999, one on Specifying and Implementing Conversation Policies (SICP) and the other in Agent Communication Languages and presents the current state of the art of research in the field. A detailed introductory overview by the volume editors highlights a number of issues that play an important role in agent communication.

This open access book presents thirteen outstanding doctoral dissertations in Information Technology from the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering, Politecnico di Milano, Italy. Information Technology has always been highly interdisciplinary, as many aspects have to be considered in IT systems. The doctoral studies program in IT at Politecnico di Milano emphasizes this interdisciplinary nature, which is becoming more and more important in recent technological advances, in collaborative projects, and in the education of young researchers. Accordingly, the focus of advanced research is on pursuing a rigorous approach to specific research topics starting from a broad background in various areas of Information Technology, especially Computer Science and Engineering, Electronics, Systems and Control, and Telecommunications. Each year, more than 50 PhDs graduate from the program. This book gathers the outcomes of the thirteen best theses defended in 2020-21 and selected for the IT PhD Award. Each of the authors provides a chapter summarizing his/her findings, including an introduction, description of methods, main achievements and future work on the topic. Hence, the book provides a cutting-edge overview of the latest research trends in Information Technology at Politecnico di Milano, presented in an easy-to-read format that will also appeal to non-specialists.

In this book, we present a collection of papers around the topic of agent com- nication. The communication between agents has been one of the major topics of research in multiagent systems. The current work can therefore build on a number of previous Workshops of which the proceedings have been published in earlier volumes in this series. The basis of this collection is formed by the accepted submissions of the Workshop on Agent Communication held in c- junction with the AAMAS Conference in July 2004 in New York. The workshop received 26 submissions of which 14 were selected for publication in this v- ume. Besides the high-quality workshop papers we noticed that many papers on agent communication found their way to the main conference. We decided therefore to invite a number of authors to revise and extend their papers from this conference and to combine them with the workshop papers. We believe that the current collection comprises a very good and quite complete overview of the state of the art in this area of research and gives a good indication of the topics that are of major interest at the moment. The papers can roughly be divided over the following ?ve themes: – social commitments – multiparty communication – content languages – dialogues and conversations – speech acts Although these themes are of course not mutually exclusive they indicate some main directions of research. We therefore have arranged the papers in the book according to the topics indicated above.

The field of agent and multi-agent systems is concerned with the development and evaluation of sophisticated, AI-based, problem solving and control architectures for both single and multi-agent systems. This book presents the proceedings of the 7th KES Conference on Agent and Multi-agent Systems – Technologies and Applications (KES-AMSTA 2013), held in Hue City, Vietnam, in May 2013. The KES-AMSTA 2013 conference provides an internationally respected forum for scientific research in the technologies and applications of agent and multi-agent systems. In all, 44 papers were selected for oral presentation and publication in this volume. Special attention is paid to the feature topics of intelligent technologies and applications in the area of e-health, social networking, self-organizing systems, economics and trust management. Other topics covered include: agent oriented software engineering; beliefs engineering; desires and intentions representation; agent cooperation, coordination, negotiation, organization and communication; distributed problem-solving; specification of agent communication languages; formalization of ontologies; and conversational agents. The book highlights new trends and challenges in agent and multi-agent research, and will be of interest to the research community working in the fields of artificial intelligence, collective computational intelligence, robotics, dialogue systems and, in particular, agent and multi-agent systems, technologies and applications.