This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Multi-Agent-Based Simulation, MABS 2007, held in Honolulu, HI, USA in May 2007 as an associated event of AAMAS 2007, the main international conference on autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. The 10 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 20 submissions.The papers are organized in topical sections on architectures; teams, learning, education; economy, trust and reputation.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 21st International Workshop on Multi-Agent-Based Simulation, MABS 2021, held in May 2021 as part of AAMAS 2021. The conference was held virtually due to COVID 19 pandemic. The 14 revised full papers included in this volume were carefully selected from 23 submissions. The workshop focused on finding efficient solutions to model complex social systems, in such areas as economics, management, organizational and social sciences in general. In all these areas, agent theories, metaphors, models, analysis, experimental designs, empirical studies, and methodological principles, all converge into simulation as a way of achieving explanations and predictions, exploration and testing of hypotheses, better designs and systems and providing decision-support in a wide range of applications.

This book is devoted to investigating and developing the synergy between software engineering for multi-agent systems and agent-based social simulation; it originates from the Second International Workshop on Multi-Agend-Based Simulation, MABS 2000, held in Boston, MA, USA in July 2000, in conjunction with ICAMS 2000. Besides the thoroughly revised full papers accepted for presentation at the workshop, two invited papers and an introductory survey by one of the volume editors have been added in order to round off the scope and achieve complete coverage of all relevant topics. The book competently surveys the state of the art in the area by offering topical sections on model design issues, applications, simulating social relations and processes, and formal approaches.

The MATSim (Multi-Agent Transport Simulation) software project was started around 2006 with the goal of generating traffic and congestion patterns by following individual synthetic travelers through their daily or weekly activity programme. It has since then evolved from a collection of stand-alone C++ programs to an integrated Java-based framework which is publicly hosted, open-source available, automatically regression tested. It is currently used by about 40 groups throughout the world. This book takes stock of the current status. The first part of the book gives an introduction to the most important concepts, with the intention of enabling a potential user to set up and run basic simulations. The second part of the book describes how the basic functionality can be extended, for example by adding schedule-based public transit, electric or autonomous cars, paratransit, or within-day replanning. For each extension, the text provides pointers to the additional documentation and to the code base. It is also discussed how people with appropriate Java programming skills can write their own extensions, and plug them into the MATSim core. The project has started from the basic idea that traffic is a consequence of human behavior, and thus humans and their behavior should be the starting point of all modelling, and with the intuition that when simulations with 100 million particles are possible in computational physics, then behavior-oriented simulations with 10 million travelers should be possible in travel behavior research. The initial implementations thus combined concepts from computational physics and complex adaptive systems with concepts from travel behavior research. The third part of the book looks at theoretical concepts that are able to describe important aspects of the simulation system; for example, under certain conditions the code becomes a Monte Carlo engine sampling from a discrete choice model. Another important aspect is the interpretation of the MATSim score as utility in the microeconomic sense, opening up a connection to benefit cost analysis. Finally, the book collects use cases as they have been undertaken with MATSim. All current users of MATSim were invited to submit their work, and many followed with sometimes crisp and short and sometimes longer contributions, always with pointers to additional references. We hope that the book will become an invitation to explore, to build and to extend agent-based modeling of travel behavior from the stable and well tested core of MATSim documented here.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed and revised selected papers from the 22nd International Workshop on Multi-Agent-Based Simulation, MABS 2022, which took place virtually during May 8–9, 2022. The conference was originally planned to take place in Auckland, New Zealand, but had to change to an online format due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The 11 papers included in these proceedings were carefully reviewed and selected from 17 submissions. They focus on finding efficient solutions to model complex social systems, in areas such as economics, management, organisational and social sciences in general.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Multi-Agent-Based Simulation, MABS 2006. This was held in Hakodate, Japan, May 8, 2006 as an associated event of AAMAS 2006, the main international conference on autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. The 12 revised full papers presented together with three short papers and two invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 25 submissions during two rounds of reviewing.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 18th International Workshop on Multi-Agent-Based Simulation, MABS 2017, held in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in May 2017. The workshop was held in conjunction with the 16th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, AAMAS 2017. The 15 revised full papers included in this volume were carefully selected from 23 submissions. The topic of the papers is about applying agent-based simulation techniques to real-world problems focusing on the confluence of socio-technical-natural sciences and multi-agent systems with a strong application/empirical vein.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 13th International Workshop on Multi-Agent-Based Simulation, MABS 2012, held in Valencia, Spain, in June 2012. The 11 revised full papers presented were carefully selected from 35 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on modeling social interactions; cognition and agents behaviors; agents, games and finance; and methodologies and tools.

In multi-agent-based simulation (MABS) the behavior of individual actors is modeled in detail. The analysis and validation of these models is rated as difficult and requires support by innovative techniques and tools. Problems include model complexity, the amount and often qualitative representation of simulation results, and the typical dichotomy between microscopic modeling and macroscopic observation perspectives. In recent years, data mining has been increasingly applied as a support technique in this context. A particularly promising approach is found in the field of process mining. Due to its rooting in business process analysis, process mining shares several process- and organization-oriented analysis perspectives and use cases with agent-based modeling. This thesis proposes a conceptual framework for the systematic application of process mining to the analysis and validation of MABS. As a foundation, agent-oriented analysis perspectives and simulation-specific use cases are identified and complemented with methods, techniques, and results from the literature. A partial formalization of perspectives and use cases is sketched by utilizing concepts from process modeling and software engineering. Beyond the conceptual work, process mining is applied in two case studies related to different modeling and simulation approaches.

In the ten years since the first MAAMAW was held in 1989, at King's College, Cambridge, the field of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) has flourished. It has attracted an increasing amount of theoretical and applied research. During this decade, important efforts have been made to establish the scientific and technical foundations of MAS. MAAMAW publications are testimony to the progress achieved in key areas such as agent modelling and reasoning, multi-agent interaction and communication, and multi-agent organisation and social structure. Research results have covered a wide range of inter-related topics in each area including agent architectures, reasoning models, logics, conflict resolution, negotiation, resource allocation, load balancing, learning; social behaviour and interaction, languages and protocols, interagent and agent-human communication, social models, agent roles, norms and social laws, and static and dynamic organisational structures. The feasibility and the viability of the proposed models and techniques have been demonstrated through MAS applications in heterogeneous domains including electronic commerce, co-operative work, telecommunications, social and biological systems, robotics, office and business automation, public administration, social simulations and banking. As the applicability of the technology became understood, the multi-agent paradigm has been progressively accepted by product managers and system developers, giving rise to a considerable amount of business expectation from industry. These expectations do not rest on the concept or metaphor of agent, but on the development of MAS useful in an industrial setting, with real-time systems presenting the biggest challenge.