Building effective and user-friendly transportation systems is one of the big challenges for engineers in the 21st century. There is an increasing need to understand, model, and govern such systems at both the individual (micro) and the society (macro) level. Still, this raises significant technical problems, as transportation systems may contain thousands of autonomous, "intelligent" entities that need to be simulated and/or controlled. Therefore, traffic and transportation scenarios are extraordinarily appealing for Distributed Artificial Intelligence, and (multi-) agent technology in...

More and more transactions, whether in business or related to leisure activities, are mediated automatically by computers and computer networks, and this trend is having a significant impact on the conception and design of new computer applications. The next generation of these applications will be based on software agents to which increasingly complex tasks can be delegated, and which interact with each other in sophisticated ways so as to forge agreements in the interest of their human users. The wide variety of technologies supporting this vision is the subject of this volume. It...

More and more transactions, whether in business or related to leisure activities, are mediated automatically by computers and computer networks, and this trend is having a significant impact on the conception and design of new computer applications. The next generation of these applications will be based on software agents to which increasingly complex tasks can be delegated, and which interact with each other in sophisticated ways so as to forge agreements in the interest of their human users. The wide variety of technologies supporting this vision is the subject of this volume. It...