Olivier Boissier - Böcker

This book addresses the question of how to achieve social coordination in Socio-Cognitive Technical Systems (SCTS). SCTS are a class of Socio-Technical Systems that are complex, open, systems where several humans and digital entities interact in order to achieve some collective endeavour. The book approaches the question from the conceptual background of regulated open multiagent systems, with the question being motivated by their design and construction requirements. The book captures the collective effort of eight groups from leading research centres and universities, each of which has developed a conceptual framework for the design of regulated multiagent systems and most have also developed technological artefacts that support the processes from specification to implementation of that type of systems. The first, introductory part of the book describes the challenge of developing frameworks for SCTS and articulates the premises and the main concepts involved in those frameworks. The second part discusses the eight frameworks and contrasts their main components. The final part maps the new field by discussing the types of activities in which SCTS are likely to be used, the features that such uses will exhibit, and the challenges that will drive the evolution of this field.

This book addresses the question of how to achieve social coordination in Socio-Cognitive Technical Systems (SCTS).

This book constitutes the refereed post-proceedings of the International Workshop on Agents, Norms and Institutions for Regulated Multiagent Systems, ANIREM 2005, and the International Workshop on Organizations in Multi-Agent Systems, OOOP 2005, held in Utrecht, The Netherlands, July 2005. This is the first volume in a new series on issues in Coordination, Organizations, Institutions and Norms (COIN) in multi-agent systems. Topics include modeling, analyzing and programming organizations and more.

In recent years, social and organizational aspects of agency have become major research topics in MAS. Recent applications of MAS on Web services, grid c- puting and ubiquitous computing highlight the need for using these aspects in order to ensure social order within such environments. Openness, heterogeneity, and scalability of MAS, in turn, pose new demands on traditional MAS int- action models and bring forward the need to look into the environment where agents interact and at di?erent ways of constraining or regulating interactions. Consequently, the view of coordination and governance has been expanding to entertain not only an agent-centric perspective but societal and organizati- centric views as well. The overall problem of analyzing the social, legal, economic, and technolo- caldimensionsofagentorganizations,andthe co-evolutionofagentinteractions, provide theoretically demanding and interdisciplinary research questions at d- ferent levels of abstraction. The MAS research community has addressed these issues from di?erent perspectives that have gradually become more cohesive around the four notions in the title to the workshop: coordination, organization, institutions, and norms. The COIN workshops are thus designed to consolidate the subject by providing focus events that reach researchers from diverse c- munities working in related topics and facilitate more systematic discussion of themes that have been treated from various perspectives. This year, the COIN workshops were hosted during AAMAS 2006, (on June 9,in Hakodate,Japan)and ECAI2006(on August28,in Rivadel Garda,Italy). The papers contained in this volume are the revised versions of a selection of thosethatwerepresented in these workshops.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the International Workshop on Coordination, Organization, Institutions and Norms in Agent Systems, COIN 2008, held as two events at AAMAS 2008, the 7th International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems in Estoril, Portugal, in May 2008 and at AAAI 2008, the 23rd AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Chicago, IL, USA, in July 2008. This volume is the 4th in a series focussing on issues in Coordination, Organizations, Institutions and Norms (COIN) in multi-agent systems. The 17 papers contained in this volume are the revised and extended versions of a selection of papers presented and discussed in these two workshops. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: from coordination to organization, from organization to coordination, formalization of norms and institutions, design of norms and institutions, as well as applications.