The Internet confronts IT researchers, system designers, and application developers with completely new challenges and, as a fascinating new computing paradigm, agent technology has recently attracted broad interest and strong hopes for shaping the future information society. This monograph-like anthology is the first systematic guide to models and enabling technologies for the coordination of intelligent agents on the Internet and respective applications.

Papers collected here, from a December 2001 workshop held at the University of Central Florida, examine topics related to process coordination and ubiquitous computing. Papers on coordination models discuss areas such as space-based coordination and open distributed systems, global virtual data stru

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th International Workshop on Cooperative Information Agents, CIA 2008, held in Prague, Czech Republik, in September 2008. The book contains 5 invited papers and 19 revised full papers which were carefully reviewed and selected from 38 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on Trust, Applications, Coordination and Communications, and Negotiation.

Since the 1980s, software agents and multi-agent systems have grown into what is now one of the most active areas of research and development activity in computing generally. One of the most important reasons for the current intensity of interest in the agent-based computing paradigm certainly is that the concept of an agent as an autonomous system, capable of interacting with other agents in order to satisfy its design objectives, is a natural one for software designers. This recognition has led to the growth of interest in agents as a new paradigm for software engineering. This book reflects the state of the art in the field by presenting 14 revised full papers accepted for the second workshop on this topic, AOSE 2001, together with five invited survey articles. The book offers topical sections on societies and organizations, protocols and interaction frameworks, UML and agent systems, agent-oriented requirements capture and specification, and analysis and design.

Based on a suitably defined coordination model distinguishing between objective (inter-agent) coordination and subjective (intra-agent) coordination, this book addresses the engineering of multi-agent systems and thus contributes to closing the gap between research and applications in agent technology. After reviewing the state of the art, the author introduces the general coordination model ECM and the corresponding object-oriented coordination language STL++. The practicability of ECM/STL++ is illustrated by the simulation of a particular collective robotics application and the automation of an e-commerce trading system. Situated at the intersection of behavior-based artificial intelligence and concurrent and distributed systems, this monograph is of relevance to the agent R&D community approaching agent technology from the distributed artificial intelligence point of view as well as for the distributed systems community.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Environments for Multiagent Systems, E4MAS 2005, held in Utrecht, The Netherlands, in July 2005, as an associated event of AAMAS 2005. The 16 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from the lectures given at the workshop completed by a number of invited papers of prominent researchers active in the domain. The papers are organized in topical sections on models, architecture, and design, mediated coordination, as well as applications.

Design is an art form in which the designer selects from a myriad of alternatives to bring an "optimum" choice to a user. In many complex of "optimum" is difficult to define. Indeed, the users systems the notion themselves will not agree, so the "best" system is simply the one in which the designer and the user have a congruent viewpoint. Compounding the design problem are tradeoffs that span a variety of technologies and user requirements. The electronic business system is a classically complex system whose tradeoff criteria and user views are constantly changing with rapidly developing underlying technology. Professor Milutinovic has chosen this area for his capstone contribution to the computer systems design. This book completes his trilogy on design issue in computer systems. His first work, "Surviving the Design of a 200 MHz RISC Microprocessor" (1997) focused on the tradeoffs and design issues within a processor. His second work, "Surviving the Design of Microprocessor and Multiprocessor Systems" (2000) considers the design issues involved with assembling a number of processors into a coherent system. Finally, this book generalizes the system design problem to electronic commerce on the Internet, a global system of immense consequence.

This book represents the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Agent-Oriented Software Engineering, AOSE 2005. The 18 revised full papers were carefully selected from 35 submissions during two rounds of reviewing and improvement. The papers are organized in topical sections on modeling tools, analysis and validation tools, multiagent systems design, implementation tools, and experiences and comparative evaluations.

Solving complex problems in real-world contexts, such as financial investment planning or mining large data collections, involves many different sub-tasks, each of which requires different techniques. To deal with such problems, a great diversity of intelligent techniques are available, including traditional techniques like expert systems approaches and soft computing techniques like fuzzy logic, neural networks, or genetic algorithms. These techniques are complementary approaches to intelligent information processing rather than competing ones, and thus better results in problem solving are achieved when these techniques are combined in hybrid intelligent systems. Multi-Agent Systems are ideally suited to model the manifold interactions among the many different components of hybrid intelligent systems. This book introduces agent-based hybrid intelligent systems and presents a framework and methodology allowing for the development of such systems for real-world applications. The authors focus on applications in financial investment planning and data mining.

Consider the problem of a robot (algorithm, learning mechanism) moving along the real line attempting to locate a particular point ? . To assist the me- anism, we assume that it can communicate with an Environment (“Oracle”) which guides it with information regarding the direction in which it should go. If the Environment is deterministic the problem is the “Deterministic Point - cation Problem” which has been studied rather thoroughly [1]. In its pioneering version [1] the problem was presented in the setting that the Environment could charge the robot a cost which was proportional to the distance it was from the point sought for. The question of having multiple communicating robots locate a point on the line has also been studied [1, 2]. In the stochastic version of this problem, we consider the scenario when the learning mechanism attempts to locate a point in an interval with stochastic (i. e. , possibly erroneous) instead of deterministic responses from the environment. Thus when it should really be moving to the “right” it may be advised to move to the “left” and vice versa. Apart from the problem being of importance in its own right, the stoch- tic pointlocationproblemalsohas potentialapplications insolvingoptimization problems. Inmanyoptimizationsolutions–forexampleinimageprocessing,p- tern recognition and neural computing [5, 9, 11, 12, 14, 16, 19], the algorithm worksits wayfromits currentsolutionto the optimalsolutionbasedoninfor- tion that it currentlyhas. A crucialquestionis oneof determining the parameter whichtheoptimizationalgorithmshoulduse.