Enrique Herrera-Viedma – författare

This book presents the outcomes of the special sessions of the 16th International Conference on Distributed Computing and Artificial Intelligence 2019, a forum that brought together ideas, projects and lessons associated with distributed computing and artificial intelligence, and their applications in various areas.

Artificial intelligence is currently transforming our society. Its application in distributed environments, such as the internet, electronic commerce, environmental monitoring, mobile communications, wireless devices, and distributed computing, to name but a few, is continuously increasing, making it an element of high added value and tremendous potential.

These technologies are changing constantly as a result of the extensive research and technical efforts being pursued at universities and businesses alike. The exchange of ideas between scientists and technicians from both the academic and industrial sectors is essential to facilitating the development of systems that can meet the ever-growing demands of today’s society.

This year’s technical program was characterized by high quality and diversity, with contributions in both well-established and evolving areas of research. More than 120 papers were submitted to the main and special sessions tracks from over 20 different countries (Algeria, Angola, Austria, Brazil, Colombia, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Oman, Poland, Portugal, South Korea, Spain, Thailand, Tunisia, the United Kingdom and United States), representing a truly “wide area network” of research activity. 

The symposium was jointly organized by the Osaka Institute of Technology and the University of Salamanca. This year’s event was held in Avila, Spain, from 26th to 28th June, 2019. The authors wish to thank the sponsors: the IEEE Systems Man and Cybernetics Society, Spain Section Chapter and the IEEE Spain Section (Technical Co-Sponsor), IBM, Indra, Viewnext, Global Exchange, AEPIA, APPIA and AIR institute.

The word consensus has been  frequently used  for centuries, perhaps millenia. People have always deemed it important that decisions having a long lasting impact on groups, countries or even civilizations be arrived at in a consensual manner.  Undoubtedly the complexity of modern world in all its social, technological, economic and cultural dimensions has created new environments where consensus is regarded desirable.  Consensus typically denotes a state of agreement prevailing in a group of agents, human or software.    In the strict sense of the term, consensus means that the agreement be unanimous.  Since such a state is often unreachable or even unnecessary, other less demanding consensus-related notions have been introduced. These typically involve some graded, partial or imprecise concepts. The contributions to this volume define and utilize such less demanding - and thus at the same time more general - notions of consensus.  However, consensus can also refer to a process whereby the state of agreement is reached.  Again this state can be something less stringent than a complete unanimity of all agents regarding all options. The process may involve modifications, resolutions and /or mitigations of the views or inputs of individuals or software agents in order to achieve the state of consensus understood in the more general sense.   The consensus reaching processes call for some soft computational approaches, methods and techniques, notably fuzzy and possibilistic ones. These are needed to accommodate the imprecision in the very meaning of some basic concepts utilized in the definition of consensus as a state of agreement and as a process whereby this state is to be reached. The overall aim of this volume is to provide a comprehensive overview and analysis of the issuesrelated to consensus states and consensual processes.