Bücher von Jeremy Pitt

Adaptation, for purposes of self-healing, self-protection, self-management, or self-regulation, is currently considered to be one of the most challenging pr- erties of distributed systems that operate in dynamic, unpredictable, and - tentially hostile environments. Engineering for adaptation is particularly c- plicated when the distributed system itself is composed of autonomous entities that, on one hand, may act collaboratively and with benevolence, and, on the other,maybehavesel?shlywhilepursuingtheirowninterests.Still,theseentities have to coordinate themselves in order to adapt appropriately to the prevailing environmental conditions, and furthermore, to deliberate upon their own and the system's con?guration, and to be transparent to their users yet consistent with any human requirements. The question, therefore, of "e;how to organize the envisagedadaptationforsuchautonomousentitiesinasystematicway"e;becomes of paramount importance. The ?rst international workshop on "e;Organized Adaptation in Multi-Agent Systems"e; (OAMAS) was a one-day event held as part of the workshop p- gram arranged by the international conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS). It was hosted in Estoril during May, 2008, and was attended by more than 30 researchers. OAMAS was the steady convergence of a number of lines of research which suggested that such a workshop would be timely and opportune. This includes the areas of autonomic computing, swarm intelligence, agent societies, self-organizing complex systems, and 'emergence' in general.

The fourth internationalworkshop,"e;EngineeringSocietiesin the Agents World"e; (ESAW 2003) was a three-dayevent that took place at the end of October 2003. After previous events in Germany, the Czech Republic, and Spain, the workshop crossed the Channel, to be held at the premises of Imperial College, London. The steady increase in the variety of backgrounds of contributing sci- tists, fascinating new perspectives on the topics, and number of participants, bespeaks the success of the ESAW workshop series. Its idea was born in 1999 among members of the working group on "e;Communication, Coordination, and Collaboration"e; of the ?rst lease of life of the European Network of Excellence on Agent-Based Computing, AgentLink, out of a critical discussion about the general mindset of the agent community. At that time, we felt that proper c- siderationsofsystemicaspectsofagenttechnologydeployment,suchasackno- edgement of the importance of the social and environmental perspectives, were sorely missing: a de?ciency that we resolved should be addressed directly by a new forum.