Emergent Intelligence of Networked Agents

The study of intelligence emerged from interactions among agents has been popular. In this study it is recognized that a network structure of the agents plays an important role. The current state-of-the art in agent-based modeling tends to be a mass of agents that have a series of states that they can express as a result of the network structure in which they are embedded. Agent interactions of all kinds are usually structured with complex networks. The idea of combining multi-agent systems and complex networks is also particularly rich and fresh to foster the research on the study of very large-scale multi-agent systems. Yet our tools to model, understand, and predict dynamic agent interactions and their behavior on complex networks have lagged far behind. Even recent progress in network modeling has not yet offered us any capability to model dynamic processes among agents who interact at all scales on complex networks.

This book is based on communications given at the Workshop on Emergent Intelligence of Networked Agents (WEIN 06) at the Fifth International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-agent Systems (AAMAS 2006), which was held at Future University, Hakodate, Japan, from May 8 to 12, 2006. WEIN 06 was especially intended to increase the awareness of researchers in these two fields sharing the common view on combining agent-based modeling and complex networks in order to develop insight and foster predictive methodologies in studying emergent intelligence on of networked agents. From the broad spectrum of activities, leading experts presented important paper and numerous practical problems appear throughout this book. The papers contained in this book are concerned with emergence of intelligent behaviors over networked agents and fostering the formation of an active multi-disciplinary community on multi-agent systems and complex networks.