Adaptive Agents and Multi-Agent Systems is an emerging and exciting interdisciplinary area of research and development involving artificial intelligence, computer science, software engineering, and developmental biology, as well as cognitive and social science. This book surveys the state of the art in this emerging field by drawing together thoroughly selected reviewed papers from two related workshops; as well as papers by leading researchers specifically solicited for this book. The articles are organized into topical sections on - learning, cooperation, and communication - emergence and evolution in multi-agent systems - theoretical foundations of adaptive agents

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the First International Workshop on Learning and Adaption in Multi-Agent Systems, LAMAS 2005, held in The Netherlands, in July 2005, as an associated event of AAMAS 2005. The 13 revised papers presented together with two invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from the lectures given at the workshop.

"This book is based on the workshop on Adaptation and Learning in Multi-Agent Systems, held in conjunction with the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI'95, in Montreal, Canada in August 1995. The 14 thoroughly reviewed revised papers reflect the whole scope of current aspects in the field: they describe and analyze, both experimentally and theoretically, new learning and adaption approaches for situations in which several agents have to cooperate or compete. Also included, and aimed at the novice reader, are a comprehensive introductory survey on the area with 154 references listed and a subject index. As the first book solely devoted to this area, this volume documents the state of the art and is thus indispensable for anyone active or interested in the field."--PUBLISHER'S WEBSITE.

An autonomous agent is a computational system that acquires sensory data from its environment and decides by itself how to relate the external stimulus to its behaviors in order to attain certain goals. Responding to different stimuli received from its task environment, the agent may select and exhibit different behavioral patterns. The behavioral patterns may be carefully predefined or dynamically acquired by the agent based on some learning and adaptation mechanism(s). In order to achieve structural flexibility, reliability through redundancy, adaptability, and reconfigurability in real-world tasks, some researchers have started to address the issue of multiagent cooperation. Broadly speaking, the power of autonomous agents lies in their ability to deal with unpredictable, dynamically changing environments. Agent-based systems are becoming one of the most important computer technologies, holding out many promises for solving real-world problems. The aims of this book are to provide a guided tour to the pioneering work and the major technical issues in agent research, and to give an in-depth discussion on the computational mechanisms for behavioral engineering in autonomous agents. Through a systematic examination, the book attempts to provide the general design principles for building autonomous agents and the analytical tools for modeling the emerged behavioral properties of a multiagent system.

This book contains selected and revised papers of the European Symposium on Adaptive and Learning Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (ALAMAS), editions 2005, 2006 and 2007, held in Paris, Brussels and Maastricht. The goal of the ALAMAS symposia, and this associated book, is to increase awareness and interest in adaptation and learning for single agents and mul- agent systems, and encourage collaboration between machine learning experts, softwareengineeringexperts,mathematicians,biologistsandphysicists,andgive a representative overviewof current state of a?airs in this area. It is an inclusive forum where researchers can present recent work and discuss their newest ideas for a ?rst time with their peers. Thesymposiaseriesfocusesonallaspectsofadaptiveandlearningagentsand multi-agent systems, with a particular emphasis on how to modify established learning techniques and/or create new learning paradigms to address the many challenges presented by complex real-world problems. These symposia were a great success and provided a forum for the pres- tation of new ideas and results bearing on the conception of adaptation and learning for single agents and multi-agent systems. Over these three editions we received 51 submissions, of which 17 were carefully selected, including one invited paper of this year’s invited speaker Simon Parsons. This is a very c- petitive acceptance rate of approximately 31%, which, together with two review cycles, has led to a high-quality LNAI volume. We hope that our readers will be inspired by the papers included in this volume.

"This book aims at giving a complete panorama of the active and promising crossing area between traffic engineering and multi-agent system addressing both current status and challenging new ideas"--Provided by publisher.

Adaptation, for purposes of self-healing, self-protection, self-management, or self-regulation, is currently considered to be one of the most challenging pr- erties of distributed systems that operate in dynamic, unpredictable, and - tentially hostile environments. Engineering for adaptation is particularly c- plicated when the distributed system itself is composed of autonomous entities that, on one hand, may act collaboratively and with benevolence, and, on the other,maybehavesel?shlywhilepursuingtheirowninterests.Still,theseentities have to coordinate themselves in order to adapt appropriately to the prevailing environmental conditions, and furthermore, to deliberate upon their own and the system’s con?guration, and to be transparent to their users yet consistent with any human requirements. The question, therefore, of “how to organize the envisagedadaptationforsuchautonomousentitiesinasystematicway”becomes of paramount importance. The ?rst international workshop on “Organized Adaptation in Multi-Agent Systems” (OAMAS) was a one-day event held as part of the workshop p- gram arranged by the international conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS). It was hosted in Estoril during May, 2008, and was attended by more than 30 researchers. OAMAS was the steady convergence of a number of lines of research which suggested that such a workshop would be timely and opportune. This includes the areas of autonomic computing, swarm intelligence, agent societies, self-organizing complex systems, and ‘emergence’ in general.

Agent Technology, or Agent-Based Approaches, is a new paradigm for developing software applications. It has been hailed as 'the next significant breakthrough in software development', and 'the new revolution in software' after object technology or object-oriented programming. In this context, an agent is a computer system which is capable of act

Adaptive agents and multi-agent systems is an emerging and exciting interdisciplinary area of research and development involving artificial intelligence, software engineering, and developmental biology, as well as cognitive and social science. This book presents 17 revised and carefully reviewed papers taken from two workshops on the topic as well as 2 invited papers by leading researchers in the area. The papers deal with various aspects of machine learning, adaptation, and evolution in the context of agent systems and autonomous agents.

This book provides an overview of multi-agent systems and several applications that have been developed for real-world problems. Multi-agent systems is an area of distributed artificial intelligence that emphasizes the joint behaviors of agents with some degree of autonomy and the complexities arising from their interactions. Multi-agent systems allow the subproblems of a constraint satisfaction problem to be subcontracted to different problem solving agents with their own interest and goals. This increases the speed, creates parallelism and reduces the risk of system collapse on a single point of failure. Different multi-agent architectures, that are tailor-made for a specific application are possible. They are able to synergistically combine the various computational intelligent techniques for attaining a superior performance. This gives an opportunity for bringing the advantages of various techniques into a single framework. It also provides the freedom to model the behavior of the system to be as competitive or coordinating, each having its own advantages and disadvantages.