The paradigm of self-organisation is fundamental to theories of collective action in economic science and democratic governance in political science. Self-organisation in these social systems critically depends on voluntary compliance with conventional rules: that is, rules which are made up, mutually agreed, and modifiable 'on the fly'. How, then, can we use the self-organisation observed in such social systems as an inspiration for decentralised computer systems, which can face similar problems of coordination, cooperation and collaboration between autonomous peers?Self-Organising Multi-Agent Systems presents an innovative and systematic approach to transforming theories of economics and politics (and elements of philosophy, psychology, and jurisprudence) into an executable logical specification of conventional rules. It shows how sets of such rules, called institutions, provide an algorithmic basis for designing and implementing cyber-physical systems, enabling intelligent software processes (called agents) to manage themselves in the face of competition for scarce resources. It also provides a basis for implementing socio-technical systems with interacting human and computational intelligences in a way that is sustainable, fair and legitimate.This interdisciplinary book is essential reading for anyone interested in the 'planned emergence' of global properties, commonly-shared values or successful collective action, especially as a product of social construction, knowledge management and political arrangements. For those studying both computer science and social sciences, this book offers a radically new gateway to a transformative understanding of complex system development and social system modelling.Understanding how a computational representation of qualitative values like justice and democracy can lead to stability and legitimacy of socio-technical systems is among the most pressing software engineering challenges of modern times. This book can be read as an invitation to make the Digital Society better.Related Link(s)

What is the secret of successful collective action that enables communities to maintain common-pool resources, withstand disasters and make effective decisions? How can this secret be reproduced in algorithmic form and so enable intelligent software processes (agents) to cooperate, collaborate and coordinate? The paradigm of self-organisation has often been observed in the natural sciences and is one of the foundations of sustainable common-pool resource management in economic science and democratic governance in political science. Self-Organising Multi-Agent Systems presents an innovative and systematic approach to transforming theories of economics and politics (and philosophy, psychology, and jurisprudence) into formal specifications of conventional rules. It shows how sets of such rules, called institutions, provide an algorithmic basis for designing and implementing self-organising multi-agent systems for successful collective action in cyber-physical and socio-technical systems. This interdisciplinary book is essential reading for anyone interested in the planned emergence of global properties or commonly-shared values as a product of social construction, knowledge management and political arrangements. Valuable for those studying both computer and social sciences, this book is a gateway to a better understanding of complex system development and social system analysis and an invitation to make the Digital Society better.

This book is a must read for aviation managers and all stakeholders that are interested in improving the business performance of airlines. In this book, the first of its kind on AI in Commercial Aviation, the author outlines how Machine Learning and AI are accelerating and improving the performance of airlines. Moreover, the author shares insights into many new use cases that emerging technology can deliver. He tackles all crucial functions from air navigation, flight operations, to sales, distribution, cargo, retailing, and commercial optimization. He then looks forward to blockchain and the metaverse and its opportunities. With connected devices and the Internet of Everything (IoE), airlines can become retailers, sell, deliver, and service holistic experiences tailored to individuals in real time. This requires airlines to modernize processes and practices supported by decision intelligence (AI) that ingests sophisticated insights and executes service automation in real time. Transforming airlines from a production to a services-based execution also requires departments to be aligned along overriding customer experience and profitability goals. The book demonstrates how AI can be deployed to redesign airline organization as well. The author also describes the next wave of business transformation around the integration of commercial functions using Composite AI at enterprise level. With his holistic understanding and experience in the airline industry, the author provides valuable insights and helps managers understand how to embrace ML and AI and contribute to future commercial aviation and cargo success.

An autonomous agent is a computational system that acquires sensory data from its environment and decides by itself how to relate the external stimulus to its behaviors in order to attain certain goals. Responding to different stimuli received from its task environment, the agent may select and exhibit different behavioral patterns. The behavioral patterns may be carefully predefined or dynamically acquired by the agent based on some learning and adaptation mechanism(s). In order to achieve structural flexibility, reliability through redundancy, adaptability, and reconfigurability in real-world tasks, some researchers have started to address the issue of multiagent cooperation. Broadly speaking, the power of autonomous agents lies in their ability to deal with unpredictable, dynamically changing environments. Agent-based systems are becoming one of the most important computer technologies, holding out many promises for solving real-world problems. The aims of this book are to provide a guided tour to the pioneering work and the major technical issues in agent research, and to give an in-depth discussion on the computational mechanisms for behavioral engineering in autonomous agents. Through a systematic examination, the book attempts to provide the general design principles for building autonomous agents and the analytical tools for modeling the emerged behavioral properties of a multiagent system. Contents: Behavioral Modeling, Planning, and Learning; Synthetic Autonomy; Dynamics of Distributed Computation; Self-Organized Autonomy in Multi-Agent Systems; Autonomy-Oriented Computation; Dynamics and Complexity of Autonomy-Oriented Computation. Readership: Undergraduate and graduate students in computer science and most engineering disciplines, as well as computer scientists, engineers, researchers and practitioners in the field of machine intelligence.

Self-organisation, self-regulation, self-repair and self-maintenance are promising conceptual approaches for dealing with complex distributed interactive software and information-handling systems. Self-organising applications dynamically change their functionality and structure without direct user intervention, responding to changes in requirements and the environment. This is the first book to offer an integrated view of self-organisation technologies applied to distributed systems, particularly focusing on multiagent systems. The editors developed this integrated book with three aims: to explain self-organisation concepts and principles, using clear definitions and a strong theoretical background; to examine how self-organising behaviour can be modelled, analysed and systematically engineered into agent behaviour; and to assess the types of problems that can be solved using self-organising multiagent systems. The book comprises chapters covering all three dimensions, synthesising up-to-date research work and the latest technologies and applications. The book offers dedicated chapters on concepts such as self-organisation, emergence in natural systems, software agents, stigmergy, gossip, cooperation and immune systems. The book then explains how to engineer artificial self-organising software, in particular it examines methodologies and middleware infrastructures. Finally, the book presents diverse applications of self-organising software, such as constraint satisfaction, trust management, image recognition and networking. The book will be of interest to researchers working on emergent phenomena and adaptive systems. It will also be suitable for use as a graduate textbook, with chapter summaries and exercises, and an accompanying website that includes teaching slides, exercise solutions and research project outlines. Self-organisation, self-regulation, self-repair and self-maintenance are promising conceptual approaches for dealing with complex distributed interactive software and information-handling systems. Self-organising applications dynamically change their functionality and structure without direct user intervention, responding to changes in requirements and the environment. This is the first book to offer an integrated view of self-organisation technologies applied to distributed systems, particularly focusing on multiagent systems. The editors developed this integrated book with three aims: to explain self-organisation concepts and principles, using clear definitions and a strong theoretical background; to examine how self-organising behaviour can be modelled, analysed and systematically engineered into agent behaviour; and to assess the types of problems that can be solved using self-organising multiagent systems. The book comprises chapters covering all three dimensions, synthesising up-to-date research work and the latest technologies and applications. The book offers dedicated chapters on concepts such as self-organisation, emergence in natural systems, software agents, stigmergy, gossip, cooperation and immune systems. The book then explains how to engineer artificial self-organising software, in particular it examines methodologies and middleware infrastructures. Finally, the book presents diverse applications of self-organising software, such as constraint satisfaction, trust management, image recognition and networking. The book will be of interest to researchers working on emergent phenomena and adaptive systems. It will also be suitable for use as a graduate textbook, with chapter summaries and exercises, and an accompanying website that includes teaching slides, exercise solutions and research project outlines.

This work is about creating desired artificial self-organization in multi-agent and multi-robotic systems. It is demonstrated that emergent phenomena can artificially be designed when to treat collective systems on a new structural level. Examples of desired self-organization, implemented in manufacturing environment and in a large-scale swarm of micro-robots, allow deeper understanding of collective artificial intelligence. The work wins the infos-faculty-award as the best dissertation of 2008.

This book treats the computational use of social concepts as the focal point for the realisation of a novel class of socio-technical systems, comprising smart grids, public display environments, and grid computing. These systems are composed of technical and human constituents that interact with each other in an open environment. Heterogeneity, large scale, and uncertainty in the behaviour of the constituents and the environment are the rule rather than the exception. Ensuring the trustworthiness of such systems allows their technical constituents to interact with each other in a reliable, secure, and predictable way while their human users are able to understand and control them. "Trustworthy Open Self-Organising Systems" contains a wealth of knowledge, from trustworthy self-organisation mechanisms, to trust models, methods to measure a user's trust in a system, a discussion of social concepts beyond trust, and insights into the impact open self-organising systems will have on society.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Engineering Self-Organising Applications, ESOA 2006, held in Hakodate, Japan in May 2006. This was an associated event of AAMAS 2006, the 5th International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems. The seven full papers presented together with six invited papers were carefully selected for inclusion in the book.

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

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.