Guest Editorial

The increasing complexity of real-world problems demands for special support for cooperative problem solving in distributed environments. Recent advances in Multi-Agent Systems, Artificial Intelligence, and Computational Intelligence set the premises for the development of a new generation of Intelligent Agent-Based Cooperative Systems. These systems are composed of autonomous, non-antagonistic and social agents equipped with suitable interaction protocols and strategies aimed at improving the social outcome of the system.

IDC’2009, the 3rd International Symposium on Intelligent Distributed Computing, was held in Cyprus, Ayia Napa, October 13-14, 2009. From 36 accepted submissions, 6 articles that address highly relevant topics for the advancement of the field of Intelligent Agent-Based Cooperative Systems were selected and invited for extension and publication in this Journal issue.

The article “Cost of Cooperation for Scheduling Meetings” by Alon Grubshtein and Amnon Meisels introduces a new measure called Cost of Cooperation (CoC) for meetings scheduling games (MSG) that is useful for motivating selfish agents to cooperate. Using CoC, authors define a new game property called “Cooperation game” according to which participants may be better off cooperating rather than playing selfishly.

The article “TEAMLOG in action: a case study in teamwork” by Barbara Dunin-Kêplicz, Rineke Verbrugge, and Michal Slizak presents an application of authors’ recent formalism termed TEAMLOG for formal modelling of teamwork in multi-agent systems, to model an agent system for cleaning ecological disasters.

The article “A Case Study on Availability of Sensor Data in Agent Cooperation” by Christian Johansson, Fredrik Wernstedt, and Paul Davidsson evaluates the effects of practical limitations in the availability and quality of sensor data onto the effectiveness of agents’ cooperative behaviour in a multi-agent system for Demand Side Management on the energy market.

The article “A Layered Rule-Based Architecture for Approximate Knowledge Fusion” by Barbara Dunin-Keplicz, Linh Anh Nguyen, and Andrzej Szaas proposes a rule-based framework based on a Horn subset of propositional dynamic logic (HSPDL) for fusing approximate knowledge from distributed and heterogeneous knowledge sources.

The article “Emergent Properties for Data Distribution in a Cognitive MAS” by Andrei Olaru, Adina Magda Florea, and Cristian Graþie introduces a data management system of cooperative cognitive agents that exhibits emergent properties for data distribution and replication.

The article “Distributed Parameter Tuning for Genetic Algorithms” by David F. Barrero, Antonio González-Pardo, David Camacho, and Maria D. R-Moreno introduces a system of cooperating agents for distributed parameter tuning in learning regular expressions using Genetic Algorithms.

Acknowledgements

Great thanks are first given to ComSIS and its Editor-in-Chief, Mirjana Ivanoviæ who kindly offered the publication of this special selection. We would also like to thank George Angelos Papadopoulos and Konstantinos Kakousis from Department of Computer Science, University of Cyprus, Cyprus who greatly helped us with hosting and organizing IDC’2009. In addition, we would like to thank all the reviewers for their restless reviewing effort and valuable feedback and all the authors who submitted papers to this issue.

Costin Bãdicã received the M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of Craiova, Romania in 1990 and 1999, respectively. In 2006 he also received the title of Professor of Computer Science from University of Craiova. He is currently with the Department of Software Engineering, Faculty of Automatics, Computers and Electronics of the University of Craiova, Romania. During 2001 and 2002 he was Post-Doctoral Fellow with the Department of Computer Science, King’s College London, United Kingdom. His current research interests are at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence, Distributed Systems and Software Engineering, including applications of multi-agent systems, information extraction, and formal modeling of business processes. He has authored and co-authored more than 100 publications related to these topics as journal articles, book chapters and conference papers. He has prepared special journal issues and co-edited four books in Springer’s Studies in Computational Intelligence series. He co-initiated and he is co-organizing the Intelligent Distributed Computing – IDC series of conferences that is being held yearly. He also served as PC member of many international conferences.

Guest Editor
Costin Bãdicã