Computational Conflicts

A book edited par Juergen H. Müller and Rose Dieng available in Springer Verlag catalogue.

Preface

One aim of Artificial Intelligence is to model the world (facts, relationships,actors, action, behaviour etc.) in computers in order to build systems to enhance people's living. Since conflicts are part of our world the question is how to modelthem and how to model human behaviour in the context of conflicts. This is what the book is about and our aim is to convince our readers that it is worth attackingreal world modelling problems through thinking in terms of conflicts, their management, their resolution strategies or their avoidance.

Research from several disciplines contribute in a deeper understanding andmanagement of conflicts among human agents or among artificial agents : Cognitive Psychology, Philosophy, Social Sciences, Organization Sciences,CSCW, Distributed Artificial Intelligence (in particular, Multi-agent systems), Software Engineering (in particular Requirement Engineering), ConcurrentEngineering, Design, Knowledge Representation, Knowledge Engineering, Knowledge Management, Knowledge-Based Systems, Game Theory...

Such multidisciplinary research helps to understand the different facets ofconflicts, to build a formal theory of conflicts for reasoning about them, to develop applications relying on interacting computational agents that may be inconflict, to offer generic strategies for solving or managing such conflicts. Therefore, this book gives an overview of different viewpoints from severaldisciplines, and aims at answering to several questions:

Editing a book is a complex activity and we are happy to say that though thereis a huge potential for conflicts there were no conflicting situations during the editing process. This fact is due to the patience of the numerous authors of thisbook, who worked hard to write excellent chapters. We deeply thank all the authors for their high-quality contributions. Moreover we are grateful for theassistance of Christian Schmitt who was responsible for producing the corporate look of the book which was a tough task. His work was supported by Bruno Beaufils. His deep knowledge of LaTeX helped us a lot to get things work.

H. Jürgen Müller, Rose Dieng,

Darmstadt/Sophia-Antipolis, November 1999

Table of Contents