Innovations in Multi-Agent Systems and Applications

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 satisfactionproblem 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 alsoprovides the freedom to model the behavior of the system to be as competitive or coordinating, each having its own advantages and disadvantages.