Discover the latest developments and issues in multi-agent systems by exploring their applications in various domains such as electronic markets, e-tourism, ambience intelligence, and complex system analysis. The book is written by two researchers with hands-on experience in technology transfer. With their practical focus, they help you see how agent technology can be applied in many new services and environments.

This book presents selected tutorial lectures given at the summer school on Multi-Agent Systems and Their Applications held in Prague, Czech Republic, in July 2001 under the sponsorship of ECCAI and Agent Link. The 20 lectures by leading researchers in the field presented in the book give a competent state-of-the-art account of research and development in the field of multi-agent systems and advanced applications. The book offers parts on foundations of MAS; social behaviour, meta-reasoning, and learning; and applications.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Environments for Multiagent Systems, E4MAS 2014 - 10 years later, held in Paris, France, in May 2014 as an associated event of AAMAS 2014, the 13th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems. The 6 revised full papers presented together with 1 roadmap paper and 7 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 14 initial submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on connecting agents, environments, and humans; environments for complex and stigmergic systems; virtual and simulated environments; and open agent environments and interoperability.

Simulation and Decision Making, Multi-Agent Applications, Management and e-Business, Mobile Agents and Robots, and Machine Learning. In addition to the main tracks of the symposium there were the following five special sessions: Agent- Based Optimization (ABO2010), Agent-Enabled Social Computing (AESC2010), Digital Economy (DE2010), Using Intelligent Systems for Information Technology Assessment (ISITA2010) and a Doctoral Track. Accepted and presented papers highlight new trends and challenges in agent and multi-agent research. We hope these results will be of value to the research com- nity working in the fields of artificial intelligence, collective computational intel- gence, robotics, machine learning and, in particular, agent and multi-agent systems technologies and applications. We would like to express our sincere thanks to the Honorary Chairs, Romuald Cwilewicz, President of the Gdynia Maritime University, Poland, and Lakhmi C. Jain, University of South Australia, Australia, for their support. Our special thanks go to the Local Organizing Committee chaired by Ireneusz Czarnowski, who did very solid and excellent work. Thanks are due to the Program Co-chairs, all Program and Reviewer Committee members and all the additional - viewers for their valuable efforts in the review process, which helped us to guarantee the highest quality of selected papers for the conference. We cordially thank the - ganizers and chairs of special sessions, which essentially contributed to the success of the conference.

Distributed and multi-agent systems are becoming more and more the focus of attention in artificial intelligence research and have already found their way into many practical applications. An important prerequisite for their success is an ability to flexibly adapt their behavior via intelligent cooperation. Successful reasoning about and within a multiagent system is therefore paramount to achieve intelligent behavior. Distributed Constraint Satisfaction Problems (DCSPs) and Distributed Constraint Optimization (minimization) Problems (DCOPs) are perhaps ubiquitous in distributed systems in dynamic environments. Many important problems in distributed environments and systems, such as action coordination, task scheduling and resource allocation, can be formulated and solved as DCSPs and DCOPs. Therefore, techniques for solving DCSPs and DCOPs as well as strategies for automated reasoning in distributed systems are indispensable tools in the research areas of distributed and multi-agent systems. They also provide promising frameworks to deal with the increasingly diverse range of distributed real world problems emerging from the fast evolution of communication technologies.The volume is divided in two parts. One part contains papers on distributed constraint problems in multi-agent systems. The other part presents papers on Agents and Automated Reasoning.

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.

This volume contains the proceedings of the Third KES Symposium on Agent and Multi-agent Systems – Technologies and Applications (KES-AMSTA 2009)––held at Uppsala University in Sweden during June 3-5, 2009. The symposium was organized by Uppsala University, KES International and its Focus Group on Agent and Multi-agent Systems. The KES-AMSTA Symposium series is a sub-series of the KES Conference series. Following the successes of the First KES Symposium on Agent and Multi-agent Systems – Technologies and Applications (KES-AMSTA 2007), held in Wroclaw, Poland, from May 31 to 1 June 2007––and the Second KES Symposium on Agent and Multi-agent Systems – Technologies and Applications (KES-AMSTA 2008) held in Incheon, Korea, March 26-28, 2008––KES-AMSTA 2009 featured keynote talks, oral and poster presentations, and a number of workshops and invited sessions, closely aligned to the themes of the conference. The aim of the symposium was to provide an international forum for scientific - search into the technologies and applications of agent and multi-agent systems. Agent and multi-agent systems are an innovative type of modern software system and have long been recognized as a promising technology for constructing autonomous, c- plex and intelligent systems. A key development in the field of agent and multi-agent systems has been the specification of agent communication languages and formali- tion of ontologies. Agent communication languages are intended to provide standard declarative mechanisms for agents to communicate knowledge and make requests of each other, whereas ontologies are intended for conceptualization of the knowledge domain.

Agents are software processes that perceive and act in an environment, processing their perceptions to make intelligent decisions about actions to achieve their goals. Multi-agent systems have multiple agents that work in the same environment to achieve either joint or conflicting goals. Agent computing and technology is an exciting, emerging paradigm expected to play a key role in many society-changing practices from disaster response to manufacturing to agriculture. Agent and mul- agent researchers are focused on building working systems that bring together a broad range of technical areas from market theory to software engineering to user interfaces. Agent systems are expected to operate in real-world environments, with all the challenges complex environments present. After 11 successful PRIMA workshops/conferences (Pacific-Rim International Conference/Workshop on Multi-Agents), PRIMA became a new conference titled “International Conference on Principles of Practice in Multi-Agent Systems” in 2009. With over 100 submissions, an acceptance rate for full papers of 25% and 50% for posters, a demonstration session, an industry track, a RoboCup competition and workshops and tutorials, PRIMA has become an important venue for multi-agent research. Papers submitted are from all parts of the world, though with a higher representation of Pacific Rim countries than other major multi-agent research forums. This volume presents 34 high-quality and exciting technical papers on multimedia research and an additional 18 poster papers that give brief views on exciting research.

This book addresses the problem of multi-agent systems, considering that it can be interpreted as a generalized multi-synchronization problem. From manufacturing tasks, through encryption and communication algorithms, to high-precision experiments, the simultaneous cooperation between multiple systems or agents is essential to successfully carrying out different modern activities, both in academy and industry. For example, the coordination of multiple assembler robots in manufacturing lines. These agents need to synchronize. The first two chapters of the book describe the synchronization of dynamical systems, paying special attention to the synchronization of non-identical systems. Following, the third chapter presents an interesting application of the synchronization phenomenon for state estimation. Subsequently, the authors fully address the multi-agent problem interpreted as multi-synchronization. The final chapters introduce the reader to a more complex problem, the synchronization of systems governed by partial differential equations, both of integer and fractional order. The book aimed at graduates, postgraduate students and researchers closely related to the area of automatic control. Previous knowledge of linear algebra, classical and fractional calculus is requested, as well as some fundamental notions of graph theory.