Abstract
Multi-agent systems (MAS) are built around the central notions of agents, interaction, and environment. Agents are autonomous computational entities able to pro-actively pursue goals, and re-actively adapt to environment change. In doing so, they leverage on their social and situated capabilities: interacting with peers, and perceiving/acting on the environment. The relevance of MAS is steadily growing as they are extensively and increasingly used to model, simulate, and build heterogeneous systems across many different application scenarios and business domains, ranging from logistics to social sciences, from robotics to supply chain, and more. The reason behind such a widespread and diverse adoption lies in MAS great expressive power in modeling and actually supporting operational execution of a variety of systems demanding decentralized computations, reasoning skills, and adaptiveness to change, which are a perfect fit for MAS central notions introduced above. This special issue gathers 11 contributions sampling the many diverse advancements that are currently ongoing in the MAS field.
Highlights
As intelligent systems pervade more and more our everyday life, the need for a coherent set of abstractions and technical tools to support their design, development, and maintenance keeps growing steadily
Researchers can share their most novel and exciting findings and results is crucial to support and promote the development and spreading of new Multi-agent systems (MAS) models and technologies: this is the main motivation behind the special issue
In spite of the heterogeneity of the application domains and the techniques adopted, all the described approaches leverage on MAS central notions to improve delivering of decision support functionalities, either by simulation [3,4] or as an operational platform [5,6]
Summary
As intelligent systems pervade more and more our everyday life, the need for a coherent set of abstractions and technical tools to support their design, development, and maintenance keeps growing steadily. A few decades of intensive academic and industrial research on MAS, and their integration with the most recent advances in AI techniques and IoT technologies, have promoted the intense development and widespread diffusion of novel agent-oriented techniques, methods, and tools, and paved the way towards the acceptance of MAS as the forthcoming industrial mainstream for complex yet reliable intelligent systems. Providing a platform where MAS researchers can share their most novel and exciting findings and results is crucial to support and promote the development and spreading of new MAS models and technologies: this is the main motivation behind the special issue
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