Agreement Technologies

More and more transactions, whether in business or related to leisure activities, are mediated automatically by computers and computer networks, and this trend is having a significant impact on the conception and design of new computer applications. The next generation of these applications will be based on software agents to which increasingly complex tasks can be delegated, and which interact with each other in sophisticated ways so as to forge agreements in the interest of their human users. The wide variety of technologies supporting this vision is the subject of this volume. It summarises the European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) Action project on Agreement Technologies (AT), during which approximately 200 researchers from 25 European countries, along with eight institutions from non-COST countries, cooperated as part of a number of working groups. The book is the first to provide a comprehensive overview of the emerging field of Agreement Technologies, written and coordinated by the leading researchers in the field. The results set out here are due for wide dissemination beyond the computer technology sector, involving law and social science as well.

This volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Conference on Agreement Technologies, AT 2013, held in Beijing, China, in August 2013. The 15 revised full papers presented together with two invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions and focus on topics such as semantic technologies, normative multiagent systems, virtual organisations and electronic institutions, argumentation and negotiation, trust and reputation, applications of agreement technologies, agreement technologies architectures, environments and methodologies, as well as interdisciplinary foundations of agreement technologies.

This book constitutes the revised selected papers from the 6th International Conference on Agreement Technologies, AT 2018, held in Bergen, Norway, in December 2018. The 11 full papers and 6 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 28 submissions. The papers discuss new ideas and techniques for the design, implementation and verification of next generation open distributed systems centered on the notion of agreement among computational agents. They are organized in the following topical sections: AT foundations and modelling of reasoning agents; argumentation and negotiation; coordination in open distributed systems with applications.

This book constitutes the revised selected papers from the 14th European Conference on Multi-Agent Systems, EUMAS 2016, and the Fourth International Conference on Agreement Technologies, AT 2016, held in Valencia, Spain, in December 2016. The 43 papers and 2 invited papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 68 submissions. The papers cover thematic areas as agent and multi-agent system models, algorithms, applications, simulations, theoretical studies, and for AT the thematic areas are: algorithms

This book constitutes the revised selected papers from the 13 European Conference on Multi-Agent Systems, EUMAS 2015, and the Third International Conference on Agreement Technologies, AT 2015, held in Athens, Greece, in December 2015. The 36 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 65 submissions. They are organized in topical sections named: coordination and planning; learning and optimization, argumentation and negotiation; norms, trust, and reputation; agent-based simulation and agent programming.

This book constitutes the revised post-conference proceedings of the 17th European Conference on Multi-Agent Systems, EUMAS 2020, and the 7th International Conference on Agreement Technologies, AT 2020, which were originally planned to be held as a joint event in Thessaloniki, Greece, in April 2020. Due to COVID-19 pandemic the conference was postponed to September 2020 and finally became a fully virtual conference. The 38 full papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 53 submissions. The papers report on both early and mature research and cover a wide range of topics in the field of autonomous agents and multi-agent systems.

This book constitutes the revised selected papers from the 15th European Conference on Multi-Agent Systems, EUMAS 2017, and the 5th International Conference on Agreement Technologies, AT 2017, held in Evry, France, in December 2017.The 28 full papers, 3 short papers, and 2 invited papers for EUMAS and the 14 full papers and 2 short papers for AT, presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 76 submissions. The papers cover thematic areas like agent-based modelling; logic and formal methods; argumentation and rational choice; simulation; games; negotiation, planning, and coalitions; algorithms and frameworks; applications; and philosophical and theoretical studies.

This title was first published in 2000. An account of the 1988 US-Japan Science and Technology Agreement (88STA). The research methodology of the study is based on interviews and analysis of the relevant documents and articles augmented by an analysis of selected studies on US-Japan and science and technology relations. The author hopes to: increase the reader's understanding of the bureaucratic process and negotiations within the US and Japanese government in drafting an agreement and the interaction of the negotiators in the outcome; increase our knowledge about how the US-Japanese relationship in science and technology in the public sector is managed; throw some light on how domestic factors impact on preparing for a negotiating a new agreement between the US and Japan on science and technology; develop insights into the negotiating styles of each country; assess its role as a model agreement for negotiating similar agreements with other countries; learn some lessons for future negotiations with Japan in the science and technology area and with other countries if this Agreement is to be used as a model.