This book provides a new bidding strategy for agents to adopt in continuous double auctions (CDAs) and proposes some generally used tools to enhance the performance of existing bidding strategies in CDAs. It is the first book to focus on CDAs where a limited amount of seller agents and buyer agents trade what they want. The superior performance of the new bidding strategy and the tools proposed by this book are illustrated through extensive experiments.

This book provides a new bidding strategy for agents to adopt in continuous double auctions (CDAs) and proposes some generally used tools to enhance the performance of existing bidding strategies in CDAs. It is the first book to focus on CDAs where a limited amount of seller agents and buyer agents trade what they want. The superior performance of the new bidding strategy and the tools proposed by this book are illustrated through extensive experiments.

Agents are software processes that perceive and act in an environment, processing their perceptions to make intelligent decisions about actions to achieve their goals. Multi-agent systems have multiple agents that work in the same environment to achieve either joint or conflicting goals. Agent computing and technology is an exciting, emerging paradigm expected to play a key role in many society-changing practices from disaster response to manufacturing to agriculture. Agent and mul- agent researchers are focused on building working systems that bring together a broad range of technical areas from market theory to software engineering to user interfaces. Agent systems are expected to operate in real-world environments, with all the challenges complex environments present. After 11 successful PRIMA workshops/conferences (Pacific-Rim International Conference/Workshop on Multi-Agents), PRIMA became a new conference titled “International Conference on Principles of Practice in Multi-Agent Systems” in 2009. With over 100 submissions, an acceptance rate for full papers of 25% and 50% for posters, a demonstration session, an industry track, a RoboCup competition and workshops and tutorials, PRIMA has become an important venue for multi-agent research. Papers submitted are from all parts of the world, though with a higher representation of Pacific Rim countries than other major multi-agent research forums. This volume presents 34 high-quality and exciting technical papers on multimedia research and an additional 18 poster papers that give brief views on exciting research.

Agent-based technology provides a new computing paradigm, where intelligent agents can be used to perform tasks such as sensing, planning, scheduling, reasoning and decision-making. In an agent-based system, software agents with sufficient intelligence and autonomy can either work independently or coordinately with other agents to accomplish tasks and missions. In this book, we provide up-to-date practical applications of agent-based technology in various fields, such as electronic commerce, grid computing, and adaptive virtual environment. The selected applications are invaluable for researchers and practitioners to understand the practical usage of agent-based technology, and also to apply agent-based technology innovatively in different areas.

This book is centered on Smart grids and micro-grids, as a cost-effective method of ensuring fair and equitable access to power in urban areas. It also considers scenarios where deploying smart grids can be both cost-prohibitively expensive and logistically challenging. Deploying smart microgrids instead, offers a reliable power solution but, as is the case in smart grids, a key issue is guaranteeing usability, trust, and reliability while protecting against energy theft. This book considers aspects such as state estimation, capacity planning, demand forecasting, price signals, and demand management with respect to energy theft. Straight-forward approaches to provoking energy theft on smart grids and micro-grids include mis-recordings power consumption/generation information and exposures of personally identifiable information or sensitive information. Attack models based on mis-recorded generation and/or consumption data and exposure of personally identifiable information, are also studied. In each case, countermeasures are proposed to circumvent the power theft attacks raised. Researchers in Smart Micro-grids security, cyber-physical systems, and critical infrastructure will want to purchase this book as a reference. Professionals, Researchers, Academics and students working in security general and Security of Critical Infrastructure, Privacy, and Data Sharing will also want to purchase this book as a reference.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Intelligent Data Engineering and Automated Learning, IDEAL 2006. The 170 revised full papers presented were carefully selected from 557 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on learning and information processing, data mining, retrieval and management, bioinformatics and bio-inspired models, agents and hybrid systems, financial engineering, as well as a special session on nature-inspired date technologies.