Customer Reviews

Multiagent Systems: A Modern Approach to Distributed Artificial Intelligence

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

While perhaps this should not be your first book in AI, it should definitely be your first book on agents. It took me years to accumulate the knowledge present in this book, and it's a great survey of the field for the beginning investigator. However, while this is a great way to get started in agents, understand how agents can be used in intelligent applications (from distributed AI type problem solving, to resource optimization problems), and "get the agent paradigm," coverage of agent software engineering techniques is light. This is not a fault of this book - you will simply need other resources to understand the difficulties and current research in engineering multi agent systems (or indeed any concurrent distributed system). So if you are trying to figure out what to do with agents, or how agent systems work, this is the book for you. If you already know that and want help with formal specification of an agent, verifying your agents meet the specifications, etc. this is not the book for you. Understand that to build systems you will need both!

Thogh edited the book looks like a single authored text. The definitions are clearly presented with illustrations. The presentation is highly comprehensive. The book is thus highly readable with minimum effort. I liked the chapters on distributed problem solving and planning (Chapter 3),Learning in multiagent systems (chapter 6), Formal methods in DAI: Logic based representation and reasoning (chapter 8)and Groupware and computer supported cooperative work (chapter 10) very much.Readers of diverse interest in distributed artificial intelligence will find the other chapters equally interesting and useful.The book should be on the desk of anyone interested to learn the concepts of multiagent systems and technology.

I have been using this book probably for an year now, and this has become indispensable to my work. The collection of authors in this book reads as an 'who's who' in multiagent systems and distributed AI research. Although, its' difficult to maintain continuity in edited books, the editor has done an commendable job. The authors provide a readable introduction to their area of expertise, and supplement them with an excellent bibliography...enough to get u started fast.