Building research grade multi-agent systems usually involves a broad variety of software infrastructure ingredients like planning, scheduling, coordination, communication, transport, simulation, and module integration technologies and as such constitutes a great challenge to the individual researcher active in the area. The book presents a collection of papers on approaches that will help make deployed and large scale multi-agent systems a reality. The first part focuses on available infrastructure and requirements for constructing research-grade agents and multi-agent systems. The second part deals with support in infrastructure and software development methods for multi-agent systems that can directly support coordination and management of large multi-agent communities; performance analysis and scalability techniques are needed to promote deployment of multi-agent systems to professionals in software engineering and information technology.

High communication efforts and poor problem solving results due to restricted overview are two central issues in collaborative problem solving. This work addresses these issues by introducing the processes of agent melting and agent splitting that enable individual problem solving agents to continually and autonomously reconfigure and adapt themselves to the particular problem to be solved. The author provides a sound theoretical foundation of collaborative problem solving itself and introduces various new design concepts and techniques to improve its quality and efficiency, such as the multi-phase agreement finding protocol for external problem solving, the composable belief-desire-intention agent architecture, and the distribution-aware constraint specification architecture for internal problem solving. The practical relevance and applicability of the concepts and techniques provided are demonstrated by using medical appointment scheduling as a case study.

This book includes contributions from an interdisciplinary field of research we call Socionics. Based on a close cooperation between sociologists and researchers from distributed artificial intelligence and multiagent systems, Socionics deals with the exploration of the emergence and dynamics of artificial social systems, agent societies, as well as hybrid man-machine societies. The aim is both to develop intelligent computer technologies by picking up theoretical concepts and methods from sociology and to improve sociological models of societies and organizations by using advanced computer technology. The 15 articles in this state-of-the-art survey combine selected contributions from sociology and informatics on the modeling, construction, and study of complex social systems with special regard to the problem of scaling multiagent systems. The discussion focuses on four specific research areas: multi-layer modeling, organization and self-organization, emergence of social structures, and paths from an agent-centered to a communication-centered perspective in modeling multiagent systems.

This volume contains the papers selected for presentation at CEEMAS 2001. The wo- shop was the fourth in a series of international conferences devoted to autonomous agents and multi-agent systems organized in Central-Eastern Europe. Its predecessors wereCEEMAS’99andDAIMAS’97,whichtookplaceinSt. Petersburg,Russia,aswell as DIMAS’95, which took place in Cracow, Poland. Organizers of all these events made efforts to make them wide-open to participants from all over the world. This would have been impossible without some help from friendly centers in the Czech Republic, England, France, Japan, and The Netherlands. DIMAS’95 featured papers from 15 countries, while CEEMAS’99 from 18 co- tries. A total of 61 papers were submitted to CEEMAS 2001 from 17 countries. Out of these papers, 31 were selected for regular presentation, while 14 were quali ed as posters. The motto of the meeting was “Diversity is the core of multi-agent systems". This variety of subjects was clearly visible in the CEEMAS 2001 program, addressing the following major areas of multi-agent systems: – Organizations and social aspects of multi-agent systems – Agent and multi-agent system architectures, models, and formalisms – Communication languages, protocols, and negotiation – Applications of multi-agent systems – Agent and multi-agent development tools – Theoretical foundations of DistributedAI – Learning in multi-agent systems The richness of workshop subjects was ensured thanks to the CEEMAS 2001 contributing authors as well as the keynote speakers.

This book is devoted to mechatronic, chemical, bacteriological, biological, and hybrid systems, utilizing cooperative, networked, swarm, self-organizing, evolutionary and bio-inspired design principles and targeting underwater, ground, air, and space applications. It addresses issues such as open-ended evolution, self-replication, self-development,

This book gives detailed descriptions of the development of two large scale multiagent systems: Agent.Hospital and Agent.Enterprise. These two systems have been developed in close cooperation with more than 20 enterprises and hospitals. They demonstrate clearly that multiagent technology has a great potential for innovative information systems, if a high degree of flexibility of the overall systems is required, e.g. because human actors and technical systems exhibit a great degree of local autonomy, or if the work environment is highly dynamic.

Distributed Intelligent Systems: A Coordination Perspective comprehensively answers commonly asked questions about coordination in agent-oriented distributed systems. Characterizing the state-of-the-art research in the field of coordination with regard to the development of distributed agent-oriented systems is a particularly complex endeavour; while existing books deal with specific aspects of coordination, the major contribution of this book lies in the attempt to provide an in-depth review covering a wide range of issues regarding multi-agent coordination in Distributed Artificial Intelligence. Key features: Unveils the lack of coherence and order that characterizes the area of research pertaining to coordination of distributed intelligent systems Examines coordination models, frameworks, strategies and techniques to enable the development of distributed intelligent agent-oriented systems Provides specific recommendations to realize more widespread deployment of agent-based systems