Jaime S. Sichman

Paul Davidsson

Francois Bousquet

This volume presents extended and revised versions of the papers presented at the Third International Workshop on Multi-Agent Based Simulation (MABS 2002), a workshop federated with the First International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS 2002), which was held in Bologna, Italy, in July, 2002. This workshop was the third in the MABS series. The earlier two were - ganized as workshops of the two most recent ICMAS conferences (ICMAS 1998, Paris, France and ICMAS 2000, Boston, USA). Revised versions of the papers presented at these workshops were published as volumes 1534 and 1979 in the Lecture Notes in Arti?cial Intelligence series. One aim of the workshop was to develop stronger links between those wo- ing in the social sciences and those involved with multi-agent systems. We are pleased to note that many important conferences in various disciplines such as geography, economics, ecology, sociology, and physics have hosted workshops on MABS-related topics and that many respected journals publish papers that - clude elements of MABS. But although MABS is gradually acquiring legitimacy in many disciplinary ?elds, much remains to be done to clarify the potential use of MABS in these disciplines. Researchers from these disciplines have di?erent points of view on issues such as time-frame, space, geographical scales, or- nizational levels, etc. Moreover, the interest in MABS goes beyond the scienti?c community, as MABS models have been developed and used interactively with other communities as well.

Third International Workshop, MABS 2002, Bologna, Italy, July 15-16, 2002, Revised Papers

Multi-Agent-Based Simulation II

Rosaria Conte

Nigel Gilbert

Fifteen papers were presented at the first workshop on Multi-Agent Systems and Agent-Based Simulation held as part of the Agents World conference in Paris, July 4-- 6, 1998. The workshop was designed to bring together two developing communities: the multi-agent systems researchers who were the core participants at Agents World, and social scientists interested in using MAS as a research tool. Most of the social sciences were represented, with contributions touching on sociology, management science, economics, psychology, environmental science, ecology, and linguistics. The workshop was organised in association with SimSoc, an informal group of social scientists who have arranged an irregular series of influential workshops on using simulation in the social sciences beginning in 1992. While the papers were quite heterogeneous in substantive domain and in their disciplinary origins, there were several themes which recurred during the workshop. One of these was considered in more depth in a round table discussion led by Jim Doran at the end of the workshop on 'Representing cognition for social simulation', which addressed the issue of whether and how cognition should be modelled. Quite divergent views were expressed, with some participants denying that individual cognition needed to be modelled at all, and others arguing that cognition must be at the centre of social simulation.

Jaime S. Sichman

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