Conflicts between agents acting in a multi-agent environment arise for different reasons, involve different concepts, and are dealt with in different ways, depending on the kind of agents and on the domain where they are considered. Agents may have conflicting beliefs, conflicting goals, or may have to share limited resources. Consequently, conflicts may be expressed as mere differences, or as contradictions, or even as social conflicts. They may be avoided, solved, kept, or even created deliberately. Conflicting Agents studies conflicts in the context of multi-agent systems, i.e. artificial societies modeled on the basis of autonomous, interacting agents. This book addresses questions about types of conflicts, conflict definitions and the use of conflicts as trigger functions for activities in multi-agent systems. The book is also dedicated to questions of conflict management, resolution and avoidance, i.e. the question of how agents cope with conflicts and conflicting situations.
Conflict is a major facet of many environmental challenges of our time. However, growing conflict complexity makes it more difficult to identify win-win strategies for sustainable conflict resolution. Innovative methods are needed to help predict, understand, and resolve conflicts in cooperative ways. Agent-Based Modeling of Environmental Conflict and Cooperation examines computer modeling techniques as an important set of tools for assessing environmental and resource-based conflicts and, ultimately, for finding pathways to conflict resolution and cooperation. This book has two major goals. First, it argues that complexity science can be a unifying framework for professions engaged in conflict studies and resolution, including anthropology, law, management, peace studies, urban planning, and geography. Second, this book presents an innovative framework for approaching conflicts as complex adaptive systems by using many forms of environmental analysis, including system dynamics modeling, agent-based modeling, evolutionary game theory, viability theory, and network analysis. Known as VIABLE (Values and Investments from Agent-Based interaction and Learning in Environmental systems), this framework allows users to model advanced facets of conflicts—including institution building, coalition formation, adaptive learning, and the potential for future conflict—and conflict resolution based on the long-term viability of the actors’ strategies. Written for scholars, students, practitioners, and policy makers alike, this book offers readers an extensive introduction to environmental conflict research and resolution techniques. As the result of decades of research, the text presents a strong argument for conflict modeling and reviews the most popular and advanced techniques, including system dynamics modeling, agent-based modeling, and participatory modeling methods. This indispensable guide uses NetLogo, a widely used and free modeling software package, to implement the VIABLE modeling approach in three case study applications around the world. Readers are invited to explore, adapt, modify, and expand these models to conflicts they hope to better understand and resolve.
This book consists of 35 chapters presenting different theoretical and practical aspects of Intelligent Information and Database Systems. Nowadays both Intelligent and Database Systems are applied in most of the areas of human activities which necessitates further research in these areas. In this book various interesting issues related to the intelligent information models and methods as well as their advanced applications, database systems applications, data models and their analysis and digital multimedia methods and applications are presented and discussed both from the practical and theoretical points of view. The book is organized in four parts devoted to intelligent systems models and methods, intelligent systems advanced applications, database systems methods and applications and multimedia systems methods and applications. The book will be interesting for practitioners and researchers, especially graduate and PhD students of information technology and computer science, as well more experienced academics and specialists interested in developing and verification of intelligent information, database and multimedia systems models, methods and applications. The readers of this volume are enabled to find many inspiring ideas and motivating practical examples that will help them in the current and future work.
As the field of conflict analysis and resolution continues to grow, scholars and practitioners increasingly recognize that we can learn from one another. Theory must be informed by practice and practice must draw on sound theory. Above and beyond this lies a further recognition: without at least attempting to actually engage and transform entrenched conflicts, our field cannot hope to achieve its potential. We will merely remain in a more diverse, multi-disciplinary ivory tower. This edition breaks new ground in explicitly connecting the Scholarship of Engagement to the work of conflict resolution professionals including those in the academy, those in the field, and those who refuse to choose between the two. The text explores a wide variety of examples of, and thinking on, the Scholarship of Engagement from participatory action research to peace education, and from genocide prevention to community mediation and transitional justice.
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International Symposium on Agent and Multi-Agent Systems: Technologies and Applications, KES-AMSTA 2007, held in Wroclaw, Poland in May/June 2007. Coverage includes agent-oriented Web applications, mobility aspects of agent systems, agents for network management, agent approaches to robotic systems, as well as intelligent and secure agents for digital content management.
This book brings together approaches from different subfields of artificial intelligence as well as adjoint disciplines in order to characterize a "computational model" of conflicts.
This book constitutes the proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Principles and Practice in Multi-Agent Systems, PRIMA 2011, held in Wollongong, Australia, in November 2011. The 39 papers presented together with 3 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. They focus on practical aspects of multiagent systems and are organised in topical sections on coalitions and teamwork, learning, mechanisms and voting, modeling and simulation, negotiation and coalitions, optimization, sustainability, agent societies and frameworks, argumentation, and applications.
"This 10-volume compilation of authoritative, research-based articles contributed by thousands of researchers and experts from all over the world emphasized modern issues and the presentation of potential opportunities, prospective solutions, and future directions in the field of information science and technology"--Provided by publisher.
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th European Conference on Symbolic and Quantitative Approaches to Reasoning with Uncertainty, ECSQARU 2015, held in Compiègne, France, in July 2015. The 49 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 69 submissions and cover topics on decision theory and preferences; argumentation; conditionals; game theory; belief update; classification; inconsistency; graphical models; Bayesian networks; belief functions; logic; and probabilistic graphical models for scalable data analytics. Papers come from researchers interested in advancing the technology and from practitioners using uncertainty techniques in real-world applications. The scope of the ECSQARU conferences encompasses fundamental issues, representation, inference, learning, and decision making in qualitative and numeric uncertainty paradigms.
This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed conference proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Computational Collective Intelligence, ICCCI 2013, held in Craiova, Romania, in September 2013. The 72 revised full papers presented were carefully selected from numerous submissions. Conference papers are organized in 16 technical sessions, covering the following topics: intelligent e-learning, classification and clustering methods, web intelligence and interaction, agents and multi-agent systems, social networks, intelligent knowledge management, language processing systems, modeling and optimization techniques, evolutionary computation, intelligent and group decision making, swarm intelligence, data mining techniques and applications, cooperative problem solving, collective intelligence for text mining and innovation, collective intelligence for social understanding and mining, and soft methods in collective intelligence.
