Social Order In Multiagent Systems

Social Order in Multiagent Systems provides an overview of current approaches, problems, and considerations related to the study of norms and institutions in the context of multiagent systems. The contributions in this volume share the assumption that norms and other social institutions are of vital importance for the development of multiagent systems and agent-mediated interaction. Both formal and computational models of norms and normative systems are presented, including formal analysis of normative concepts and foundational models of norms; agent and systems architectures for implementing norms; and implemented systems. Social Order in Multiagent Systems is an excellent reference for researchers in artificial intelligence and computer science, and can be used as text for advanced level courses in multiagent systems.

This book mainly aims at solving the problems in both cooperative and competitive multi-agent systems (MASs), exploring aspects such as how agents can effectively learn to achieve the shared optimal solution based on their local information and how they can learn to increase their individual utility by exploiting the weakness of their opponents. The book describes fundamental and advanced techniques of how multi-agent systems can be engineered towards the goal of ensuring fairness, social optimality, and individual rationality; a wide range of further relevant topics are also covered both theoretically and experimentally. The book will be beneficial to researchers in the fields of multi-agent systems, game theory and artificial intelligence in general, as well as practitioners developing practical multi-agent systems.

Reputation In Artificial Societies discusses the role of reputation in the achievement of social order. The book proposes that reputation is an agent property that results from transmission of beliefs about how the agents are evaluated with regard to a socially desirable conduct. This desirable conduct represents one or another of the solutions to the problem of social order and may consist of cooperation or altruism, reciprocity, or norm obedience. Reputation In Artificial Societies distinguishes between image (direct evaluation of others) and reputation (propagating meta­belief, indirectly acquired) and investigates their effects with regard to both natural and electronic societies. The interplay between image and reputation, the processes leading to them and the set of decisions that agents make on their basis are demonstrated with supporting data from agent­based simulations.

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 thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the International Workshop on Coordination, Organization, Institutions and Norms in Agent Systems, COIN 2006, held as two events at AAMAS 2006, the 5th International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems in Hakodate, Japan, and ECAI 2006, the 17th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Riva del Garda, Italy.

This book constitutes the strictly refereed post-proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Computational Logic for Multi-Agent Systems, CLIMA VI. The book presents 14 revised full technical papers, 4 contest papers, and 7 invited papers together with 1 invited article are organized in topical sections on foundational aspects of agency, agent programming, agent interaction and normative systems, the first CLIMA contest, and on the project report of the SOCS project.

Multiagent systems is an expanding field that blends classical fields like game theory and decentralized control with modern fields like computer science and machine learning. This monograph provides a concise introduction to the subject, covering the theoretical foundations as well as more recent developments in a coherent and readable manner. The text is centered on the concept of an agent as decision maker. Chapter 1 is a short introduction to the field of multiagent systems. Chapter 2 covers the basic theory of singleagent decision making under uncertainty. Chapter 3 is a brief introduction to game theory, explaining classical concepts like Nash equilibrium. Chapter 4 deals with the fundamental problem of coordinating a team of collaborative agents. Chapter 5 studies the problem of multiagent reasoning and decision making under partial observability. Chapter 6 focuses on the design of protocols that are stable against manipulations by self-interested agents. Chapter 7 provides a short introduction to the rapidly expanding field of multiagent reinforcement learning. The material can be used for teaching a half-semester course on multiagent systems covering, roughly, one chapter per lecture.

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.