Special Issue “Multi-Agent Systems”

Research work done on Intelligent Agents and Multi-Agent Systems has matured during the last decade, and many effective applications of this technology are currently deployed. Despite the fact that computational approaches for multi-agent systems have mainly emerged in the last few decades, scholars have been prolific with the variety of methods proposed to solve this paradigm. Different communities have emerged with Multi-Agent Systems as their main research topic.

Multi-agent systems allow the development of distributed and intelligent applications in complex and dynamic environments. Systems of this kind have a crucial role in life evidenced by the broad range of applied areas involved in their use, including manufacturing, management sciences, e-commerce, biotechnology, etc.

The interest of researchers in this new discipline lies in diverse reasons. Firstly, computational systems have gradually shifted towards a distributed paradigm where heterogeneous entities with different goals can enter and leave the system dynamically and interact with each other. Secondly, new computational systems should be able to negotiate with one another, typically on behalf of humans, in order to come to mutually acceptable agreements. As a consequence, autonomy, interaction, mobility and openness are key concepts studied in the area.

The purpose of this Special Issue is to make known some of the advances made in this paradigm and try to show the current state of this technology by analyzing different aspects, as well as its possible application to various domains. In this review of the current state, it is not intended to make an exhaustive exploration of all the current existing works, but rather to try to give an overview of the research in agent technology, showing the high-level of activity of this area.