Distributed Intelligent Systems: A Coordination Perspective addresses and comprehensively answers commonly asked questions about coordination in agent-oriented distributed systems. Characterizing the state-of-the-art research in the field of coordination with regard to the development of distributed agent-oriented systems is a particularly complex endeavour, as the space of available approaches is indeed considerable, and research is independently conducted in a great number of domains. While existing books deal with specific aspects of coordination, the major contribution of this book lies in the attempt to provide an in-depth review covering a wide range of issues regarding multi-agent coordination in Distributed Artificial Intelligence. In addition to reporting various sources of confusion, this book outlines the existence of a plethora of strategies and techniques adapted to different problems, agent-oriented systems, environments, and domains. In short, the current book identifies the absence of a single unified approach in addressing multi-agent coordination problems arising in any system or organization.
This book, written by world-class leaders in this field, dedicates itself to providing a state-of-the-art review of current coordination strategies and techniques. The book also describes a broad range of application domains which implement many of the coordination strategies and techniques from the field of multi-agent systems. The application domains include defense, transportation, health care, telecommunication and e-business. Based on current practical deployed applications and existing capabilities, this book also identifies and thoroughly examines trends, challenges, and future agent-oriented research directions.