This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Multi-Agent-Based Simulation, MABS 2003, held in Melbourne, Australia as part of AAMAS 2003.
The 11 revised full papers presented together with 3 invited papers were carefully selected during two rounds of reviewing and improvement. The papers are organized in topical sections on MABS techniques for MAS; economics, exchange, and influence in virtual worlds; MABS techniques for real-world modelling, and understanding and classifying MABS.
This volume presents revised versions of the papers presented at the 4th International Workshop on Multi-agent Based Simulation (MABS 2003), a workshop federated with the 2nd International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-agent Systems (AAMAS 2003), which was held in Melbourne, Australia, in July 2003. In addition to the papers presented at the workshop, three additional papers have been included in this volume (Robertson, Noto et al., and Marietto et al.).
Multiagent Based Simulation (MABS) is a vibrant interdisciplinary area which brings together researchers active within the agent-based social simulation community (ABSS) and the multiagent systems community (MAS). These two communities have different, indeed somewhat divergent, goals. The focus of ABSS is on simulating and synthesizing social behaviors in order to understand observed social systems (human, animal and even electronic) via the development and testing of new models and concepts. MAS focuses instead on the solution of hard engineering problems related to the construction, deployment and efficient operation of multiagent-based systems.
