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

The transitions discourse in the ecological modernisation of the Netherlands

Discourse analysis, socio-technical transitions, ecological modernisation

The political economy of decarbonisation: exploring the dynamics of South Africa’s electricity sector

South Africa’s coal-dominated electricity sector, a key feature of the country’s minerals-energy complex, is in crisis and subject to change. This offers potential opportunities for decarbonisation. Despite positive examples of decarbonisation in South Africa’s electricity sector, such as a procurement programme for renewable energy, there are structural path dependencies linked to coal-fired generation and security of supply. Decarbonisation goes far beyond what is technologically or even economically feasible, to encompass a complexity of political, social and economic factors. Meanwhile, decision-making in electricity is highly politicised and lack of transparency and power struggles in the policy sphere pose key challenges. Such power struggles are reflected in national debates over which technologies should be prioritised and the institutional arrangements that should facilitate them

New Outlooks on Reshaping and Revitalizing Post-Conflict Regions: Strategies, Principles and Models of Reconstruction

Within societies recently recovering from war, people operating at the community or national levels are pressed to deal with reconciliation, development, reintegration and security. Changes and advancements are already at our front door in political philosophy, technology, communications, infrastructure, and shifts in attitudes and behavior of people. All of this will affect regions and communities, and basically alter the requisites for future planning and roles of professionals. Planning in the new millennium is needed to assist people and communities to manage change by all the techniques and skills that it possesses. In progressive crisis situations there is a need for progressive methods and new approaches, especially if the systems in use are not producing necessary results and changes. The situation where the primary objective is the rebuilding of livelihoods and rebuilding a community in a traumatized setting, a holistic way of looking at the ''big picture'' is a condicio sine qua non for any sustainable development effort. The paper draws attention to situations, which require interdisciplinary approaches and the collaboration of different professional actors. In order to structure the complex question of post-conflict reconstruction in a more systematic way, a conceptual interdisciplinary model called Sustainable Communities in Post-Conflict Environments (SCOPE) could be developed for rebuilding communities. This presentation looks at how such a model, applied to places like Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo, can effectively conceptualize and design policies, programs and projects that efficiently address the above-mentioned issues, giving at the same time a new strategic and innovative approach.

Applying tropos to socio-technical system design and runtime configuration

Recent trends in Software Engineering have introduced the importance of reconsidering the traditional idea of software design as a socio-tecnical problem, where human agents are integral part of the system along with hardware and software components. Design and runtime support for Socio-Technical Systems (STSs) requires appropriate modeling techniques and non-traditional infrastructures. Agent-oriented software methodologies are natural solutions to the development of STSs, both humans and technical components are conceptualized and analyzed as part of the same system. In this paper, we illustrate a number of Tropos features that we believe fundamental to support the development and runtime reconfiguration of STSs. Particularly, we focus on two critical design issues: risk analysis and location variability. We show how they are integrated and used into a planning-based approach to support the designer in evaluating and choosing the best design alternative. Finally, we present a generic framework to develop self-reconfigurable STSs