This book originates from the First International Workshop on Computational Autonomy -Potential, Risks, Solutions, AUTONOMY 2003, held in Melbourne, Australia in July 2003 as part of AAMAS 2003. In addition to 7 revised selected workshop papers, the volume editors solicited 14 invited papers by leading researchers in the area. The workshop papers and the invited papers present a comprehensive and coherent survey of the state of the art of research on autonomy, capturing various theories of autonomy, perspectives on autonomy in different kinds of agent-based systems, and practical approaches to dealing with agent autonomy.
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 is the first comprehensive introduction to multiagent systems and contemporary distributed artificial intelligence that is suitable as a textbook.
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
This book constitutes the proceedings of the 4th Workshops on Agents and Robots for Reliable Engineered Autonomy, AREA 2024, which took place in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, on October 19, 2024, in conjunction with ECAI 2024. The 9 full papers and 1 short paper included in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 14 submissions. They deal with agent-oriented software engineering, robotic applications, formal verification, and artificial intelligence.
Intelligent agents will be the necessity of the coming century. Software agents will pilot us through the vast sea of information, by communicating with other agents. A group of cooperating agents may accomplish a task which cannot be done by any subset of them. This volume consists of selected papers from PRIMA’99, the second Paci c Rim InternationalWorkshop on Multi-Agents, held in Kyoto,Japan, on Dec- ber 2-3, 1999. PRIMA constitutes a series of workshops on autonomous agents and mul- agent systems, integrating the activities in Asia and the Pacic rim countries, such as MACC (Multiagent Systems and Cooperative Computation) in Japan, and the Australian Workshop on Distributed Arti cial Intelligence. The r st workshop, PRIMA’98, was held in conjunction with PRICAI’98, in Singapore. The aim of this workshop is to encourage activities in this e ld, and to bring togetherresearchersfromAsiaandPacic rimworkingonagentsandmultiagent issues. Unlike usual conferences, this workshop mainly discusses and explores scienti c and practical problems as raised by the participants. Participation is thus limited to professionals who have made a signi cant contribution to the topics of the workshop. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: - multi-agent systems and their applications - agent architecture and its applications - languages for describing (multi-)agent systems - standard (multi-)agent problems - challenging research issues in (multi-)agent systems - communication and dialogues - multi-agent learning - other issues on (multi-)agent systems We received 43 submissions to this workshop from more than 10 countries.
This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Engineering Societies in the Agents World, ESAW 2003, held in Madrid, Spain in September 2002. The 20 revised full papers presented were carefully selected from 35 submissions during two rounds of reviewing and improvement. The papers are organized in topical sections on views, models, engineering, and modeling and design.
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. Contents: Behavioral Modeling, Planning, and Learning; Synthetic Autonomy; Dynamics of Distributed Computation; Self-Organized Autonomy in Multi-Agent Systems; Autonomy-Oriented Computation; Dynamics and Complexity of Autonomy-Oriented Computation. Readership: Undergraduate and graduate students in computer science and most engineering disciplines, as well as computer scientists, engineers, researchers and practitioners in the field of machine intelligence.
The concept of an intelligent agent - a computational system capable of performing certain tasks autonomously - derived from the growing potential of digital computers in the mid 20th century and had been widely adopted by the early 1990s. Partly in parallel with this concept, the perspective of ambient intelligence (AmI) emerged in the late 1990s. Agent technology and AmI have many similarities, and the main purpose of this book is to provide an overview of the state-of-the-art of the scientific area that integrates these two. The book addresses a wide variety of topics related to agents and AmI, including theoretical, practical, design, implementation, ethical and philosophical issues. The 12 chapters are arranged in four sections. The first consists of three chapters discussing ethical and philosophical issues; the second part explores various approaches that can be used to develop agent-based AmI Systems; the third part contains three chapters that share the goal to endow AmI systems with useful properties like intelligence and adaptivity and the last section presents concrete applications of agent-based AmI systems. This book provides an insight into recent achievements and future challenges at the intersection of agent technology and ambient intelligence and will assist the development of more intelligent, flexible, effective and user-friendly systems as well as posing critical questions about the future of the role of agents within the AmI perspective.
This collection of recently published and refereed papers comes from workshops and colloquia held over the last two years. The papers describe the development of command and control systems, military communications systems, information systems, surveillance systems, autonomous vehicles, simulators, and HCI. The collection provides for the first time an overview of the most significant advances in the technology of intelligent agents.
