The scope of this volume is to give to the reader a wide scenario of recent works characterized by a synergistic combination of Soft Computing area with recent trends of Distributed Artificial Intelligence and Ambient Int- ligence. We edited this book for two basic motivations: the emergence of computational intelligence as a mature and integrated science, and the power of the agent paradigm in realizing complex and distributed environments. Computational Intelligence has nowadays a mature formal theory and robust implementation experiences. Intelligent agents have shown their inner ability in acquiring data and knowledge from and performing appropriate de- sions through a functional relation that maps percepts to actions. Compu- tional Intelligence inside Agents are extremely helpful to support the designer of agent-based systems in treating with unknown or ill-defined envir- ments so to better handle knowledge representation and reasoning under these assumptions. The formulation of cooperative strategies, the linguistic aspects of the communication, the local decision versus the global kno- edge, the actions and plans as distributed viewpoints could be characterized by an incomplete knowledge and by a fragmentation of logical inter- tions, faced often by a non-monotonic reasoning. While building “smart” environments many challenges arises. The system needs to interact with its users in order to obtain feedback in a non-intrusive way. Explicit/implicit feedback is needed to take decisions in near-real time.
In these last years the digital technology explosion has spawned so many new lifestyle models that the boundaries between "real" and "digital" are fiercely debated. This scenario has deeply changed the viewpoint about computer applications: computers become smaller, cheapest and hugely distributed in wired or unwired networks, applications become so flexible and intelligent as to tailor its communication facilities in order to increase the usability of the system. Such data-intensive, unstructured spaces featured by minimal or no centralized control flow, present a challenge for traditional methods of analysis, design and integration of advanced, distributed and intelligent computer systems. Within this challenge, an important role is played by two important research areas : Fuzzy Technology, thanks to its ability to exploit the tolerance for imprecision to achieve tractability and Agent Technology, thanks to its nature to employ agent-wise communities to carry out complex goals by means of smart interaction, cooperation, and pro-activeness.
Computational Intelligence inside Agents is a novel and extremely helpful approach to support the designer of smart applications that treat unknown or ill-defined situations so to better handle knowledge representation and reasoning under these assumptions. We hope this volume represents a new step on intelligent system management roadmap.
