These are the proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Cooperative Information Agents (CIA 2004), held at the Fair and Congress Center in - furt, Germany, September 27–29, 2004. It was part of the multi-conference Net. ObjectDays 2004, and, in particular, was co-located with the 2nd German Conference on Multiagent Systems Technologies (MATES 2004). In today’s networked world of linked heterogeneous, pervasive computer systems, devices, and information landscapes, the intelligent coordination and provision of relevant added-value information at any time, anywhere, by means of cooperative information agents becomes increasingly important for a variety of applications. An information agent is a computational software entity that has access to one or multiple, heterogeneous, and geographically dispersed data and information sources. It proactively searches for and maintains information on behalf of its human users, or other agents, preferably just in time. In other words,itismanagingandovercomingthedi?cultiesassociatedwithinformation overload in open, pervasive information and service landscapes. Cooperative - formation agents may collaborate with each other to accomplish both individual and shared joint goals depending on the actual preferences of their users, b- getary constraints, and resources available. One major challenge of developing agent-based intelligent information systems in open environments is to balance the autonomy of networked data, information, and knowledge sources with the potential payo? of leveraging them using information agents. Interdisciplinaryresearchanddevelopmentofinformationagentsrequires- pertise in relevant domains of information retrieval, arti?cial intelligence, database systems, human-computer interaction, and Internet and Web techn- ogy.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Cooperative Information Agents, CIA 2006, held in Edinburgh, UK in September 2006. The 29 revised full papers presented together with four invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 58 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th International Workshop on Cooperative Information Agents, CIA 2008, held in Prague, Czech Republik, in September 2008. The book contains 5 invited papers and 19 revised full papers which were carefully reviewed and selected from 38 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on Trust, Applications, Coordination and Communications, and Negotiation.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International Workshop on Cooperative Information Agents - DAI Meets Databases, CIA-97, held in Kiel, Germany, in February 1997. The book opens with 6 invited full papers by internationally leading researchers surveying the state of the art in the area. The 16 revised full research papers presented were carefully selected during a highly competitive round of reviewing. The papers are organized in topical sections on databases and agent technology, agents for database search and knowledge discovery, communication and cooperation among information agents, and agent-based access to heterogeneous information sources.

This volume is the eighth in the Intelligent Agents series associated with the ATAL workshops. These workshops on “Agent Theories, Architectures, and L- guages” have established themselves as a tradition, and play the role of small but internationally well-known conferences on the subject, where besides theory per se also integration of theory and practice is in focus. Speci?cally, ATAL - dresses issues of theories of agency, software architectures for intelligent agents, methodologies and programming languages for realizing agents, and software tools for applying and evaluating agent-based systems. ATAL 2001 featured two special tracks in which both the more theoretical / formal and the more practical aspects were present, viz. “Formal Theories of Negotiation”, organized by Frank Dignum, and “Agents for Hand-Held, Mobile, or Embedded Devices”, organized by Tim Finin. There was also an extra session on RoboCup Rescue, organized and presented by Satoshi Tadokoro and Ranjit Nair. ATAL 2001 attracted 68 papers from over 20 countries all over the world, of which 30 were selected for presentation at the workshop and publication in this volume. We invited two outstanding speakers: Fausto Giunchiglia (Trento, Italy) and Tom Dean (Brown, USA).

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Cooperative Information Systems, CIA'99, held in Uppsala, Sweden in July/August 1999. The 16 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 46 submissions. Also included are ten invited contributions by leading experts. The volume is divided in sections on information discovery and management on the Internet; information agents on the Internet-prototypes systems and applications; communication and collaboration, mobile information agents; rational information agents for electronic business; service mediation and negotiation; and adaptive personal assistance.

This book introduces major agent platforms, frameworks, systems, tools, and applications. Each system is described by their developers in sufficient detail so that the reader can get a good understanding of the architecture, functionality, and application areas of the system. All systems are running systems. One main focus of the book lies on agent platforms and toolkits.

The three volume set LNAI 4251, LNAI 4252, and LNAI 4253 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Knowledge-Based Intelligent Information and Engineering Systems, KES 2006, held in Bournemouth, UK, in October 2006. The 480 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from about 1400 submissions. The papers present a wealth of original research results from the field of intelligent information processing.

The challenge faced in today’s manufacturing and business environments is the question of how to satisfy increasingly stringent customer requirements while managing growing system complexity. For example, customers expect high-quality, customizable, low-cost products that can be delivered quickly. The systems that deliver these expectations are by nature distributed, concurrent, and stochastic, and, as a result, increasingly difficult to manage. Unfortunately, the traditional hierarchical, strictly centralized approach to control used in these domains is characteristically inflexible, fragile, and difficult to maintain. These shortcomings have led to the development of a new class of manufacturing and supply-chain decision-making approaches in recent years. Solutions based on these approaches usually explore a set of highly distributed decision-making units that are capable of autonomous operations while cooperating interactively to resolve larger problems. The units, referred to as agents in classical computer science and software engineering, or holons if physically integrated with the manufacturing hardware, interact by exchanging information. These units are motivated by arriving at local solutions as well as collaborating and sharing resources and goals in solving the overall problem in question collectively.

"Supply Chain Event Management (SCEM)" is one of the major topics in application-oriented Supply Chain Management. However, many solutions lack conceptual precision and currently available client-server SCEM-systems are ill-suited for complex supply networks in today's business environment. Agent-based proactive information logistics promises to overcome existing deficits by providing event-related information to all participants in the distributed environment. Hence, follow-up costs of disruptive events are significantly reduced for all network participants and performance of a supply network is increased. In this book a thorough analysis of the event management problem domain is the starting point to develop a generic agent-based approach to Supply Network Event Management. The main focus lies on practical issues of event management (e.g., semantic interoperability) and economic benefits to be achieved with agent technology in this state-of-the-art problem domain.