| In todays society the issue of security, understood in the widest context, have become a crucial one. The people of the information age, having instant access to the sources of knowledge and information expect the technology to improve their safety in all respects. That, straightforwardly, leads to the demand for methods, technologies, frameworks and computerized tools which serve this purpose. Nowadays such methods and tools are more and more expected to embed not only ubiquitous information sources, but also the knowledge that stems from them. The use of knowledge-based technology in security applications, and in the society at large, clearly emerges as the next big challenge. Within general set of security-related tasks we may exhale some sub-fields such us monitoring, control, crisis and rescue management.
Multiagent systems are meant to be a toolset for modelling of, automated reasoning with, and study on the behavior of compound environments that involve many perceiving, reasoning and acting parties. In a natural way they are well suited for supporting the research on foundations of automatic reasoning processes starting from data acquisition (including data entry, sensor measurements and multimedia information processing) to automatic knowledge perception, real-life situation assessment, through planning to action execution in the context of monitoring, security, and rescue techniques. These activities are closely related to many very active research areas like autonomous systems, spatio-temporal reasoning, knowledge representation, soft computing with rough, fuzzy and rough mereological approaches, perception, learning, evolution, adaptation, data mining and knowledge discovery, collective intelligence and behavior. All these research directions have plenty of possible applications in the systems that are concerned with assuring security, acting in emergency and crisis situations, monitoring of vital infrastructures, managing cooperative jobs in the situation of danger, and planning of action for the rescue campaigns. |
