Distributed AI is the branch of AI concerned with how to coordinate behavior among a collection of semi-autonomous problem-solving agents: how they can coordinate their knowledge, goals and plans to act together, to solve joint problems, or to make individually or globally rational decisions in the face of uncertainty and multiple, conflicting perspectives. Distributed, coordinated systems of problem solvers are rapidly becoming practical partners in critical human problem-solving environments, and DAI is a rapidly developing field of both application and research, experiencing explosive growth around the world. This book presents a collection of articles surveying several major recent developments in DAI. The book focuses on issues that arise in building practical DAI systems in real-world settings, and covers work undertaken in a number of major research and development projects in the U.S. and in Europe. It provides a synthesis of recent thinking, both theoretical and applied, on major problems of DAI in the 1990s.

Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI) is a dynamic area of research and this book is the first comprehensive, truly integrated exposition of the discipline presenting influential contributions from leaders in the field. Commences with a solid introduction to the theoretical and practical issues of DAI, followed by a discussion of the core research topics--communication, coordination, planning--and how they are related to each other. The third section describes a number of DAI testbeds, illustrating particular strategies commissioned to provide software environments for building and experimenting with DAI systems. The final segment contains contributions which consider DAI from different perspectives.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the Third International School and Symposium on Advanced Distributed Systems, ISSADS 2004, held in Guadalajara, Mexico in January 2004. The 25 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 46 submissions. Among the topics addressed are virtual characters, distributed toolkits, serial visual presentation, multi-agent architectures, MAS, agent-object hybrid languages, robot soccer agents, distributed querying, semantic search engines, coordination, distributed collaboration, virtual communities, peer-to-peer networks, P2P systems, distributed search mobile objects, load balancing, distributed algorithms, scheduling, and distributed information systems.

This volume contains thoroughly refereed full versions of the best papers presented at the 5th European Workshop on Modelling Autonomous Agents in a Multi-Agent World, MAAMAW '93, held in Neuchâtel, Switzerland in August 1993. The volume opens with a detailed introduction by the volume editors bringing the papers in line and offering a readers' guide. The 15 full research papers reflect the state-of-the-art in this dynamic field of research; they are organized in sections on emergence of global properties, emergence of sociality, multi-agent planning, multi-agent communication, and multi-agent architectures.

In the light of the challenges that face today's organizations, there is a grow ing recognition that future market success and long term' survival of enter prises will increasingly depend upon the effective usage of information technology. Of late, a new generation of terminology has emerged to describe enterprises. This terminology draws heavily upon the virtual concep- virtual reality, virtual organization, virtual (working) environment, and indeed virtual product. However, developing computerized organisations for the 21st century demands serious thought with regard to the judicious integration of organizational theory, design and practice with research tools and methods from within information processing technology. Within this book, we approach this aim from the perspective of a radically decentralized (possibly virtual) enterprise. We assume that organizations are becoming increasingly process-orientated, rather than adhering to the former more traditional organizational structures based upon task oriented models. This approach has proved illuminating in that, due to the inherent autonomy of organizational subunits any approach to coordinating decentralized activ ities (including workflows and business processes) necessitates a cooperative style of problem solving. This book introduces the reader to a stimulating new field of interdiscipli nary research in cooperative problem solving. In Chapter 1 Kim presents a view of three central discip14tes, namely those of Organizational Theory, Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI). The applications given here demonstrate how future enterprises will benefit from recent advances in the technological arena of cooperative knowledge processing.

The leading edge of computer science research is notoriously ?ckle. New trends come and go with alarming and unfailing regularity. In such a rapidly changing ?eld, the fact that research interest in a subject lasts more than a year is worthy of note. The fact that, after ?ve years, interest not only remains, but actually continues to grow is highly unusual. As 1998 marked the ?fth birthday of the International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages (ATAL), it seemed appropriate for the organizers of the original workshop to comment on this remarkable growth, and re ect on how the ?eld has developed and matured. The ?rst ATAL workshop was co-located with the Eleventh European Conference on Arti?cial Intelligence (ECAI-94), which was held in Amsterdam. The fact that we chose an AI conference to co-locate with is telling: at that time, we expected most researchers with an interest in agents to come from the AI community. The workshop, whichwasplannedoverthesummerof1993,attracted32submissions,andwasattended by 55 people.ATAL was the largest workshop at ECAI-94, and the clear enthusiasm on behalfofthecommunitymadethedecisiontoholdanotherATALworkshopsimple.The ATAL-94proceedingswereformallypublishedinJanuary1995underthetitleIntelligent Agents, and included an extensive review article, a glossary, a list of key agent systems, and — unusually for the proceedings of an academic workshop — a full subject index. Thehighscienti?candproductionvaluesembodiedbytheATAL-94proceedingsappear to have been recognized by the community, and resulted inATAL proceedings being the most successful sequence of books published in Springer-Verlag s Lecture Notes in Arti?cial Intelligence series.

Cooperating Heterogeneous Systems provides an in-depth introduction to the issues and techniques surrounding the integration and control of diverse and independent software components. Organizations increasingly rely upon diverse computer systems to perform a variety of knowledge-based tasks. This presents technical issues of interoperability and integration, as well as philosophical issues of how cooperation and interaction between computational entities is to be realized. Cooperating systems are systems that work together towards a common end. The concepts of cooperation must be realized in technically sound system architectures, having a uniform meta-layer between knowledge sources and the rest of the system. The layer consists of a family of interpreters, one for each knowledge source, and meta-knowledge. A system architecture to integrate and control diverse knowledge sources is presented. The architecture is based on the meta-level properties of the logic programming language Prolog. An implementation of the architecture is described, a Framework for Logic Programming Systems with Distributed Execution (FLiPSiDE). Knowledge-based systems play an important role in any up-to-date arsenal of decision support tools. The tremendous growth of computer communications infrastructure has made distributed computing a viable option, and often a necessity in geographically distributed organizations. It has become clear that to take knowledge-based systems to their next useful level, it is necessary to get independent knowledge-based systems to work together, much as we put together ad hoc work groups in our organizations to tackle complex problems. The book is for scientists and software engineers who have experience in knowledge-based systems and/or logic programming and seek a hands-on introduction to cooperating systems. Researchers investigating autonomous agents, distributed computation, and cooperating systems will find fresh ideas and new perspectives on well-established approaches to control, organization, and cooperation.

In the era of ubiquitous computing and networking, millions of electronic devices with computing facilities in the public space are connected with each other in ad hoc ways, but are required to behave coherently. Massively multi-agent systems, MMAS can be a major design paradigm or an implementation method for ubiquitous computing and ambient intelligence. As the infrastructure of massively multi-agent systems, technologies such as grid computing together with semantic annotation can be combined with agent technology. A new system design approach, society-centered design, may be realized by embedding participatory technologies in human society. This book originates from the First International Workshop on Massively Multi-Agent Systems, MMAS 2004, held in Kyoto, Japan in December 2004. The 25 revised full selected and invited papers give an excellent introduction and overview on massively multi-agent systems. The papers are organized in parts on massively multi-agent technology, teams and organization, ubiquitous computing and ambient intelligence, and massively multi-agent systems in the public space.

This book gives an overview of the state of the art in five different approaches to social science simulation on the individual level. The volume contains microanalytical simulation models designed for policy implementation and evaluation, multilevel simulation methods designed for detecting emergent phenomena, dynamical game theory applications, the use of cellular automata to explain the emergence of structure in social systems, and multi-agent models using the experience from distributed artificial intelligence applied to special phenomena. The book collects the results of an international conference which brought together social scientists and computer scientists both engaged in a wide range of simulation approaches for the first time.

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.