Loia V. (ed.) Soft Computing Agents: A New Perspective for Dynamic Information Systems

IOS Press, 2002. — 265 p.Agents or Multi-Agent Systems sketch intelligent behaviors by describing and managing computational activities shared over communities of large-grain entities. Thanks to its large potential. Agent technology has been adopted during the last years as a winning strategy to capture the essence of today's information-intensive systems The appealing agent-based approach to problem solving arises from the development of methods which distribute groups of smart entities. Each one of these actively committed to perform independent or semi-independent tasks and to exchange asynchronous messages by means of suitable communication protocols. Agents which act on behalf of humans, machines, or other agents, in trying to solve the final goal by means of interaction-oriented mechanisms. In the last years agents have acquired growing importance due to the explosion of the WWW. The availability of a global communication infrastructure imposes the need for truely distributed computations. This evolution has lead to a radical change of the traditional approach in conceiving software systems only from the action-based algorithmic systems to interaction-based systems. The rationale behind, is not only to capitalize on the opportunities offered by an underlying distributed, concurrent environment but to also explore new paradigms. There are able to model real or virtual worlds and to overcome the fracture between the power of natural expressions (such as linguistic acts, social behaviors, communityware systems) and the illusory assumption of a realistic model. The quantity and the quality of agent-oriented books is so impressive that I do not try to undertake a complete discussion in this short informal preface but in this volume the reader will find a new perspective in the plethora of the agent works. The chapters of the volume describe interesting experiences, views, proposals stemming in different areas. Web systems play an important role as a complex arena where soft computing methodologies are employed to model agent behaviors.