Agents in multiagent systems are concurrent autonomous entities that need to coordinate and to cooperate so as to perform their tasks; these coordination and cooperation tasks might be achieved through communication. Communication, also called interaction by some authors, thus represents one of the major topics in multiagent systems. The state of the art of research on communication in multiagent systems is presented in this book. First, three seminal papers by Cohen and Perrault, by Singh, and by Davis and Smith present background information and introduce the newcomer to the area. The main part of the book is devoted to current research work dealing with agent communication, communication for coordination and argumentation, protocols, and dialogue games and conversational agents. Finally, the last paper deals with the future of agent communication.

The study of multi-agent systems (MAS) focuses on systems in which many intelligent agents interact with each other. These agents are considered to be autonomous entities such as software programs or robots. Their interactions can either be cooperative (for example as in an ant colony) or selfish (as in a free market economy). This book assumes only basic knowledge of algorithms and discrete maths, both of which are taught as standard in the first or second year of computer science degree programmes. A basic knowledge of artificial intelligence would useful to help understand some of the issues, but is not essential. The book’s main aims are: To introduce the student to the concept of agents and multi-agent systems, and the main applications for which they are appropriate To introduce the main issues surrounding the design of intelligent agents To introduce the main issues surrounding the design of a multi-agent society To introduce a number of typical applications for agent technology After reading the book the student should understand: The notion of an agent, how agents are distinct from other software paradigms (e.g. objects) and the characteristics of applications that lend themselves to agent-oriented software The key issues associated with constructing agents capable of intelligent autonomous action and the main approaches taken to developing such agents The key issues in designing societies of agents that can effectively cooperate in order to solve problems, including an understanding of the key types of multi-agent interactions possible in such systems The main application areas of agent-based systems

Agents in multiagent systems are concurrent autonomous entities that need to coordinate and to cooperate so as to perform their tasks; these coordination and cooperation tasks might be achieved through communication. Communication, also called interaction by some authors, thus represents one of the major topics in multiagent systems. The state of the art of research on communication in multiagent systems is presented in this book. First, three seminal papers by Cohen and Perrault, by Singh, and by Davis and Smith present background information and introduce the newcomer to the area. The main part of the book is devoted to current research work dealing with agent communication, communication for coordination and argumentation, protocols, and dialogue games and conversational agents. Finally, the last paper deals with the future of agent communication.

In this book, we present a collection of papers around the topic of agent com- nication. The communication between agents has been one of the major topics of research in multiagent systems. The current work can therefore build on a number of previous Workshops of which the proceedings have been published in earlier volumes in this series. The basis of this collection is formed by the accepted submissions of the Workshop on Agent Communication held in c- junction with the AAMAS Conference in July 2004 in New York. The workshop received 26 submissions of which 14 were selected for publication in this v- ume. Besides the high-quality workshop papers we noticed that many papers on agent communication found their way to the main conference. We decided therefore to invite a number of authors to revise and extend their papers from this conference and to combine them with the workshop papers. We believe that the current collection comprises a very good and quite complete overview of the state of the art in this area of research and gives a good indication of the topics that are of major interest at the moment. The papers can roughly be divided over the following ?ve themes: – social commitments – multiparty communication – content languages – dialogues and conversations – speech acts Although these themes are of course not mutually exclusive they indicate some main directions of research. We therefore have arranged the papers in the book according to the topics indicated above.

InthisbookwepresentacollectionofpapersaroundthetopicofAgentCom- nication. The communication between agents has been one of the major topics of research in multi-agent systems. The current work can therefore build on a number of previous workshops, the proceedings of which have been published in earlier volumes in this series. The basis of this collection is the accepted s- missions of the workshop on Agent Communication Languages which was held in conjunction with the AAMAS conference in July 2003 in Melbourne. The workshop received 15 submissions of which 12 were selected for publication in this volume. Although the number of submissions was less than expected for an important area like Agent Communication there is no reason to worry that this area does not get enough attention from the agent community. First of all, the 12 selected papers are all of high quality. The high acceptance rate is only due to this high quality and not to the necessity to select a certain number of papers. Besides the high-quality workshop papers, we noticed that many papers on Agent Communication found their way to the main conference. We decided therefore to invite a number of authors to revise and extend their papers from this conference and to combine them with the workshop papers. We believe that the current collection comprises a very good and quite complete overview of the state of the art in this area of research and gives a good indication of the topics that are of major interest at the moment.

Cooperative Control of Multi-Agent Systems extends optimal control and adaptive control design methods to multi-agent systems on communication graphs. It develops Riccati design techniques for general linear dynamics for cooperative state feedback design, cooperative observer design, and cooperative dynamic output feedback design. Both continuous-time and discrete-time dynamical multi-agent systems are treated. Optimal cooperative control is introduced and neural adaptive design techniques for multi-agent nonlinear systems with unknown dynamics, which are rarely treated in literature are developed. Results spanning systems with first-, second- and on up to general high-order nonlinear dynamics are presented. Each control methodology proposed is developed by rigorous proofs. All algorithms are justified by simulation examples. The text is self-contained and will serve as an excellent comprehensive source of information for researchers and graduate students working with multi-agent systems.

Multiagent systems (MAS) are one of the most exciting and the fastest growing domains in the intelligent resource management and agent-oriented technology, which deals with modeling of autonomous decisions making entities. Recent developments have produced very encouraging results in the novel approach of handling multiplayer interactive systems. In particular, the multiagent system approach is adapted to model, control, manage or test the operations and management of several system applications including multi-vehicles, microgrids, multi-robots, where agents represent individual entities in the network. Each participant is modeled as an autonomous participant with independent strategies and responses to outcomes. They are able to operate autonomously and interact pro-actively with their environment. In recent works, the problem of information consensus is addressed, where a team of vehicles communicate with each other to agree on key pieces of information that enable them to work together in a coordinated fashion. The problem is challenging because communication channels have limited range and there are possibilities of fading and dropout. The book comprises chapters on synchronization and consensus in multiagent systems. It shows that the joint presentation of synchronization and consensus enables readers to learn about similarities and differences of both concepts. It reviews the cooperative control of multi-agent dynamical systems interconnected by a communication network topology. Using the terminology of cooperative control, each system is endowed with its own state variable and dynamics. A fundamental problem in multi-agent dynamical systems on networks is the design of distributed protocols that guarantee consensus or synchronization in the sense that the states of all the systems reach the same value. It is evident from the results that research in multiagent systems offer opportunities for further developments in theoretical, simulation and implementations. This book attempts to fill this gap and aims at presenting a comprehensive volume that documents theoretical aspects and practical applications.

Agent technology has recently become one of the most vibrant and fastest growing areas in information technology. This is the first systematic introduction to software agents with the goal of exploiting them in future communication systems. The coherently written chapters provide complementary coverage of the relevant issues. Multi-agent systems and mobile agent approaches are presented and applied to important topics in future communication systems.

This book is devoted to the design and analysis of techniques enabling intelligent and dynamic cooperation and communication among agents in a distributed environment. A flexible theoretical formalism is developed in detail and it is demonstrated how this approach can be used for the design of agent architectures in practice. The formal part of this work is based on a variant of the BDI logic introduced by Georgeff and Rao. This book, for the first time, outlines this formalism in some depth. The most important practical benefit provided is the concept of cooperation protocols allowing the representation of various methods of cooperation and possible patterns of dialogue.

In this book, we present a collection of papers around the topic of agent com- nication. The communication between agents has been one of the major topics of research in multiagent systems. The current work can therefore build on a number of previous Workshops of which the proceedings have been published in earlier volumes in this series. The basis of this collection is formed by the accepted submissions of the Workshop on Agent Communication held in c- junction with the AAMAS Conference in July 2004 in New York. The workshop received 26 submissions of which 14 were selected for publication in this v- ume. Besides the high-quality workshop papers we noticed that many papers on agent communication found their way to the main conference. We decided therefore to invite a number of authors to revise and extend their papers from this conference and to combine them with the workshop papers. We believe that the current collection comprises a very good and quite complete overview of the state of the art in this area of research and gives a good indication of the topics that are of major interest at the moment. The papers can roughly be divided over the following ?ve themes: – social commitments – multiparty communication – content languages – dialogues and conversations – speech acts Although these themes are of course not mutually exclusive they indicate some main directions of research. We therefore have arranged the papers in the book according to the topics indicated above.