Sascha Ossowski - Böcker

The present book brings together experience, current work, and promising future trends associated with distributed computing, artificial intelligence, and their application in order to provide efficient solutions to real problems.

This book serves as a forum to present applications of innovative techniques for studying and solving complex problems in artificial intelligence and computing. The authors would like to thank all the contributing authors, the program committee members, National Associations (AEPIA, APPIA, LASI), and the sponsors (AIR Institute).

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Cooperative Information Agents, CIA 2004, held in Erfurt, Germany, in September 2004. The 18 revised full papers presented together with 3 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 59 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on information agents and p2p computing, issues of agent communication, recommender agents, information agents and mobile computing, industrial applications, and cooperation in open environments.

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.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th Information Agents, CIA 2002, held in Helsinki, Finland in August 2003.The 17 revised full papers and 6 revised short papers presented together with 2 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 60 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on pervasive information service provision, information agents and peer-to-peer computing, trading and negotiation, information gathering and integration, collaborative search and filtering, collaboration in open environments, trust in agent-based information provision, and information agent systems engineering.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Cooperative Information Agents, CIA 2002, held in Madrid, Spain, in September 2002. The revised papers - 15 full and 8 short - presented together with 4 invited contributions, were carefully reviewed and selected from 59 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on information agents for mobile computing environments, interaction and negotiation, information gathering and collaborative filtering, agent-based information and knowledge management, agent communication and cooperation, and information agent mobility.

This monograph provides a comprehensive survey of the different approaches to coordination in societies of artificial an human agents. Setting out from a critical assessment of the state of the art, the author develops a method of structuring multi-agent applications with a mechanism called structural cooperation. Agents are equipped with expertise about their environment in order to detect and overcome specific types of problem, they make use of their social knowledge to mutually adjust their activities, and they are coerced toward coherent collective behavior through normative rules. The proposed model is formalized theoretically within game theory and realized by means of an agent architecture. It is assessed experimentally by building a prototype of a distributed decision support system for road traffic management and compared to an alternative model based on a centralized architecture.

In recent years, social and organizational aspects of agency have become - jor research topics in MAS. Current applications of MAS in Web services, grid computing and ubiquitous computing highlight the need for using these aspects in order to ensure social order within such environments. Openness, hete- geneity, and scalability of MAS, in turn, put new demands on traditional MAS interaction models and bring forward the need to investigate the environment wherein agents interact, more speci?cally to design di?erent ways of constra- ing or regulating agents' interactions. Consequently, the view of coordination and control has been expanding to entertain not only an agent-centric persp- tive but societal and organization-centric views as well. The overall problem of analyzing the social, legal, economic and technological dimensions of agent organizations and the co-evolution of agent interactions pose theoretically - manding and interdisciplinary research questions at di?erent levels of abstr- tion. The MAS research community has addressed these issues from di?erent perspectives that have gradually become more cohesive around the four c- cepts that give title to this workshop series: coordination, organization, ins- tutions and norms.The COIN@AAMAS 2007 and COIN@MALLOW 2007 events belong to a workshopseries that started in 2005, and since then has continued with two e- tions per year. The main goalof these workshopsis to bring together researchers from di?erent communities working in theoretical and/or practical aspects of coordination, organization, institutions and norms, and to to facilitate a more systematicdiscussionofthesethemesthathaveuntillatelybeenconsideredfrom di?erent perspectives.

The Semantic Web aims at enriching the existing Web with meta-data and processing methods so as to provide web-based systems with advanced capabilities, in particular with context awareness and decision support. The objective of this book is to provide a coherent introduction to semantic web methods and research issues with a particular emphasis on reasoning. The 7th reasoning web Summer School, held in August 2011, focused on the central topic of applications of reasoning for the emerging “Web of Data”. The 12 chapters in the present book provide excellent educational material as well as a number of references for further reading. The book not only addresses students working in the area, but also those seeking an entry point to various topics related to reasoning over Web data.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 9th German Conference on Multiagent System Technologies held in Berlin, Germany, in October 2011.The 12 revised full papers presented together with 6 short parers were carefully reviewed and selected from 50 submissions. Providing an interdisciplinary forum for researchers, users, and developers to present and discuss latest advances in research work as well as prototyped or fielded systems of intelligent agents and multi-agent systems, the papers cover the whole range of this sector and promote its theory and applications.

This volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Conference on Agreement Technologies, AT 2013, held in Beijing, China, in August 2013. The 15 revised full papers presented together with two invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions and focus on topics such as semantic technologies, normative multiagent systems, virtual organisations and electronic institutions, argumentation and negotiation, trust and reputation, applications of agreement technologies, agreement technologies architectures, environments and methodologies, as well as interdisciplinary foundations of agreement technologies.

Building effective and user-friendly transportation systems is one of the big challenges for engineers in the 21st century. There is an increasing need to understand, model, and govern such systems at both the individual (micro) and the society (macro) level. Still, this raises significant technical problems, as transportation systems may contain thousands of autonomous, "intelligent" entities that need to be simulated and/or controlled. Therefore, traffic and transportation scenarios are extraordinarily appealing for Distributed Artificial Intelligence, and (multi-) agent technology in particular. This book gives an overview of recent advances in agent-based transportation systems. It includes both a state-of-the-art survey and reports on cutting-edge research in the field.

More and more transactions, whether in business or related to leisure activities, are mediated automatically by computers and computer networks, and this trend is having a significant impact on the conception and design of new computer applications. The next generation of these applications will be based on software agents to which increasingly complex tasks can be delegated, and which interact with each other in sophisticated ways so as to forge agreements in the interest of their human users. The wide variety of technologies supporting this vision is the subject of this volume. It summarises the European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) Action project on Agreement Technologies (AT), during which approximately 200 researchers from 25 European countries, along with eight institutions from non-COST countries, cooperated as part of a number of working groups. The book is the first to provide a comprehensive overview of the emerging field of Agreement Technologies, written and coordinated by the leading researchers in the field. The results set out here are due for wide dissemination beyond the computer technology sector, involving law and social science as well.