Conflicting Agents: Conflict Management in Multi-Agent Systems

✍ Scribed by Catherine Tessier, Heinz-Jürgen Müller, Humbert Fiorino (auth.), Catherine Tessier, Laurent Chaudron, Heinz-Jürgen Müller (eds.)

• Publisher: Springer US
• Year: 2002
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 308
• Series: Multiagent Systems, Artificial Societies, And Simulated Organizations 1
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Conflicts between agents acting in a multi-agent environment arise for different reasons, involve different concepts, and are dealt with in different ways, depending on the kind of agents and on the domain where they are considered. Agents may have conflicting beliefs, conflicting goals, or may have to share limited resources. Consequently, conflicts may be expressed as mere differences, or as contradictions, or even as social conflicts. They may be avoided, solved, kept, or even created deliberately.
Conflicting Agents studies conflicts in the context of multi-agent systems, i.e. artificial societies modeled on the basis of autonomous, interacting agents. This book addresses questions about types of conflicts, conflict definitions and the use of conflicts as trigger functions for activities in multi-agent systems. The book is also dedicated to questions of conflict management, resolution and avoidance, i.e. the question of how agents cope with conflicts and conflicting situations.

✦ Table of Contents

Agents’ Conflicts: New Issues....Pages 1-30
Conflicts within and for Collaboration....Pages 33-61
Their Problems are My Problems....Pages 63-109
Conflicts in Social Theory and Multi-agent Systems....Pages 111-149
Conflicts in Agent Teams....Pages 153-167
Conflict-based Behaviour Emergence in Robot Teams....Pages 169-202
Conflicts in Collective Robotics....Pages 203-220
Strategic Use of Conflicts in Tutoring Systems....Pages 223-250
Conflict Handling in Collaborative Search....Pages 251-278
Conflict as a Heuristic in the Development of an Interaction Mechanics....Pages 279-302

✦ Subjects

Artificial Intelligence (incl. Robotics); Processor Architectures