Special issue on agents and multi-agent systems: From objects to agents

Abstract

Information and communication technology advances are pushing the information-oriented society of today towards the service-oriented one of tomorrow. The pervasive development of the Internet of Future concept is fastening this process allowing for an unprecedented possibility of interaction, collaboration, competition, and operation among different and autonomous software and hardware entities. Hence, added-value applications can be provided to end users resulting from the coordination of such a distributed, open, and autonomous system. This rapid change requires to address new challenges in different fields of Computer Science to develop dynamic, not centralized, geographically distributed, autonomous, adaptive and intelligent computational mechanisms to be applied in different real application scenarios. Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) are an enabling paradigm to address such emerging challenges. An agent “is an encapsulated computer system that is situated in some environment, and that is capable of flexible, autonomous action in that environment, and of communicating with other entities, in order to meet its design objectives”. Multi-Agent Systems, composed of interacting agents, represent a viable approach when software systems are required to deliberate on users’ behalf, to face unpredictable situations without human assistance, and to autonomously find solutions to complex problems in several business and industry domains. Nevertheless, with the emergence of new