Artificial Social Systems

This volume contains thoroughly refereed versions of the best papers presented at the 4th European Workshop on Modelling Automomous Agents in a Multi-Agent World, held July 29 - 31, 1992 in S. Martino al Cimino, Italy.
The book opens with an introductory survey by the volume editors not only on the collection of papers but also on the history and present situation of Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI) and its interdisciplinary relations to social sciences, artificial life, and economics. The 19 technical papers are organized into sections on artificial life and reactive systems, economics and game theory, coordination and multi-agent planning, and DAI tools and applications.

Inhalt
Multi-agent simulation as a tool for modeling societies: Application to social differentiation in ant colonies.- Experiments in multi-agent system dynamics.- Social aggregations in evolving neural networks.- An architecture for action, emotion, and social behavior.- Game theory vs. multiple agents: The iterated prisoner's dilemma.- Trust in distributed artificial intelligence.- Negotiation with incomplete information about worth: Strict versus tolerant mechanisms.- Equilibratory approach to distributed resource allocation: Toward coordinated balancing.- Strategic interaction in oligopolistic markets experimenting with real and artificial agents.- Multi agent coordinated decision-making using epistemic utility theory.- The search for coordination: Knowledge-guided abstraction and search in a hierarchical behavior space.- Multi-agent planning as search for a consensus that maximizes social welfare.- Planned team activity.- Some requirements for mobile distributed telecomputing architecture.- Multi-agent research in the knobotics group.- A conflict resolution-based decentralized multi-agent problem solving model.- Decision coordination in production management.- MAKILA: A tool for the development of cooperative societies.- User role in problem solving with distributed artificial intelligent systems.