In the existing literature the intersection of agent technology with soft computing is a very recent and attractive issue. The book is devoted to a unifying perspective of this topic. In contains contributions by well-known authors whose expertise is universally recognized in these crossing areas. Particular emphasis is devoted to advanced research projects involved with Web-related technologies.
Fundamental topics explored in this volume are: - formal theories and logics to represent and handle imprecise communication acts among communities of agents; - soft-computing approaches to define distributed problem-solving techniques to represent and reason about large-scale control systems; - decomposition of a complex system into autonomous or semiautonomous agents through evolutionary models; - enrichment of agent programming paradigm for cooperative soft-computing processing.