Gerhard Weiss (ed.): Multiagent Systems

Excerpt

The new edition of Gerhard Weiss’ book on multiagent systems is a serious textbook—at 848 pages (excluding the index) it covers all aspects of a broad and interdisciplinary field that is multiagent systems (MAS)—exactly as the editor promises in the preface. The book is comprised of 17 chapters written by various authors (31 in total). It starts with conceptual chapters on intelligent agents and agent societies, goes on to discussing different theoretical aspects of MAS such as communication (including negotiation and argumentation theory), co-ordination (social choice, cooperative game theory and trust) and cognitive abilities (learning, planning and constraint handling), and finally brings the reader to more technical areas of the field, such as engineering MAS (agent programming, specification, verification and agent-oriented software engineering), ending with fundamentals—logics and classical game theory. Each of the chapters, as mentioned before, is written by top-notch researchers in the respective fields. As you can easily see glancing at the table of contents, the scope of the presentation is indeed impressive, and it looks as if Gerhard Weiss’ endeavour is the most comprehensive treatment of the field of MAS. …