Multi-Agents Systems and Territory: Concepts, Methods and Applications

This paper analyses the multi-agents systems that are now considered the best tool to simulate and study real world. We review the main characteristics of a multi-agents system, namely interactions and cooperations of agents, communications and behaviours between them and finally the schedule of actions and jobs assignment to agents. The multi-agents system approach is increasingly applied in social and economic sciences; so we study mainly the territorial applications. In these applications new characteristics arise from the consideration of territory (land and space where the agents live or territory as an agent in itself, that evolves in the time). We study possible new applications of multi-agents applied to the territory (for instance, to define town planning policies or to locate dangerous facilities). Furthermore we study new tools to make operational multi-agents systems (mainly Swarm, the toolkit of Santa Fe Institute). With Swarm we present two kind of territorial applications: with located agents (fixed in space) and with not located agents (moving in the space). Finally we show the results of these applications.

Agent-based simulation of animal behaviour

In this paper it is shown how animal behaviour can be simulated in an agent-based manner. Different models are shown for different types of behaviour, varying from purely reactive behaviour to pro-active, social and adaptive behaviour. The compositional development method for multi-agent systems DESIRE and its software environment supports the conceptual and detailed design, and execution of these models. Experiments reported in the literature on animal behaviour have been simulated for a number of agent models

Thinking Adaptive: Towards a Behaviours Virtual

In this paper we name some of the advantages of virtual laboratories; and propose that a Behaviours Virtual Laboratory should be useful for both biologists and AI researchers, offering a new perspective for understanding adaptive behaviour. We present our development of a Behaviours Virtual Laboratory, which at this stage is focused in action selection, and show some experiments to illustrate the properties of our proposal, which can be accessed via Internet

Agents for educational games and simulations

This book consists mainly of revised papers that were presented at the Agents for Educational Games and Simulation (AEGS) workshop held on May 2, 2011, as part of the Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS) conference in Taipei, Taiwan. The 12 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from various submissions. The papers are organized topical sections on middleware applications, dialogues and learning, adaption and convergence, and agent applications

Introductory Chapter: Multi-Agent Systems

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