This book provides an overview of multi-agent systems and several applications that have been developed for real-world problems. Multi-agent systems is an area of distributed artificial intelligence that emphasizes the joint behaviors of agents with some degree of autonomy and the complexities arising from their interactions. Multi-agent systems allow the subproblems of a constraint satisfaction problem to be subcontracted to different problem solving agents with their own interest and goals. This increases the speed, creates parallelism and reduces the risk of system collapse on a single point of failure. Different multi-agent architectures, that are tailor-made for a specific application are possible. They are able to synergistically combine the various computational intelligent techniques for attaining a superior performance. This gives an opportunity for bringing the advantages of various techniques into a single framework. It also provides the freedom to model the behavior of the system to be as competitive or coordinating, each having its own advantages and disadvantages.

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