This book is a collection of high quality technical papers contributed by active researchers and leading practitioners in intelligent agent technology. It offers a closer look at the state-of-the-art in the development of intelligent agents, and examines in depth the underlying logical, cognitive, physical, and biological foundations as well as the performance characteristics of various approaches in intelligent agent technology. It will stimulate the development of new models, new methodologies, and new tools for building a variety of embodiments of agent-based systems.

Agent engineering concerns the development of autonomous computational or physical entities capable of perceiving, reasoning, adapting, learning, cooperating and delegating in a dynamic environment. It is one of the most promising areas of research and development in information technology, computer science and engineering.This book addresses some of the key issues in agent engineering: What is meant by “autonomous agents”? How can we build agents with autonomy? What are the desirable capabilities of agents with respect to surviving (they will not die) and living (they will furthermore enjoy their being or existence)? How can agents cooperate among themselves? In order to achieve the optimal performance at the global level, how much optimization at the local, individual level and how much at the global level would be necessary?

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.

This volume presents extended and revised versions of the papers presented at the Third International Workshop on Multi-Agent Based Simulation (MABS 2002), a workshop federated with the First International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS 2002), which was held in Bologna, Italy, in July, 2002. This workshop was the third in the MABS series. The earlier two were - ganized as workshops of the two most recent ICMAS conferences (ICMAS 1998, Paris, France and ICMAS 2000, Boston, USA). Revised versions of the papers presented at these workshops were published as volumes 1534 and 1979 in the Lecture Notes in Arti?cial Intelligence series. One aim of the workshop was to develop stronger links between those wo- ing in the social sciences and those involved with multi-agent systems. We are pleased to note that many important conferences in various disciplines such as geography, economics, ecology, sociology, and physics have hosted workshops on MABS-related topics and that many respected journals publish papers that - clude elements of MABS. But although MABS is gradually acquiring legitimacy in many disciplinary ?elds, much remains to be done to clarify the potential use of MABS in these disciplines. Researchers from these disciplines have di?erent points of view on issues such as time-frame, space, geographical scales, or- nizational levels, etc. Moreover, the interest in MABS goes beyond the scienti?c community, as MABS models have been developed and used interactively with other communities as well.